3. Brenna
brENNA
Bev Holloway had the kind of face that made you want to sit down and stay awhile. Warm smile lines, short curly hair, a coffee cup in her hand that I was starting to suspect was permanently attached.
She’d given me her spare room without hesitation—made up the bed, left a towel on the pillow, set a glass of water on the nightstand, and closed the door without a single question.
I’d lain there in the dark, in a stranger’s guest room, wearing borrowed pajamas, and cried so quietly I was sure she hadn’t heard me.
But the breakfast she’d set out the next morning—eggs, toast, coffee, and a small jar of homemade jam with a note that said “eat”—made me wonder if she had.
Now she took one look at me walking in with Gabriel and seated us in a booth by the window without a word. The look she gave him over my head said plenty.
I didn’t know what, specifically, that it said.
I barely knew these people. That was the thing about Whispering Pines—everyone knew everyone, and I’d been here a year and still felt like I was on the outside of a conversation that had started decades before I arrived.
Although Bev was making that harder to believe.
“The usual?” Bev asked Gabriel, already writing something on her pad.
“Yeah. And whatever she wants.”
Bev turned to me. “What can I get you, honey?”
I looked at the menu tucked behind the napkin dispenser but didn’t pick it up. My stomach was tight. I hadn’t been hungry since yesterday morning, and the smell of smoke was still living in my hair, my clothes, and the inside of my nose.
But Gabriel had walked me down here like he wasn’t going to take no for an answer. Besides, something about the way Bev was looking at me—patient, unhurried, like she’d wait all day if she had to—made me not want to disappoint either of them.
“Scrambled eggs,” I said. “And toast. And coffee. A lot of coffee.”
Bev nodded like I’d made exactly the right decision and disappeared behind the counter.
Gabriel sat across from me, his forearms on the table, hands loosely clasped.
He took up a lot of space in the booth—not because he was trying to, but because he was built like someone who couldn’t help it.
Broad shoulders, thick arms, and the kind of frame that made a standard restaurant booth look undersized.
He’d changed since yesterday. Clean shirt, no turnout gear, no soot. But the faint burn scar on his left forearm was visible below the pushed-up sleeve, and my eyes lingered on it a beat too long before I looked away.
“How long have you been doing this?” I asked. “The firefighter thing.”
“Fourteen years. Captain for the last eight.”
“That’s a long time.”
“Depends on what you’re comparing it to.”
I waited for him to elaborate. He didn’t. Gabriel Hall was not a man who filled silence for the sake of filling it. I was learning that about him as I sat there.
“I’ve had my bakery for one year,” I said. “That doesn’t feel like a long time. It feels like I just figured out where everything goes and now half of it’s gone.”
He held my gaze. “The front of the shop is intact. Display case, tables, counter—all of that’s salvageable. The kitchen is the rebuild.”
“The kitchen is the bakery.”
He nodded. He didn’t argue, didn’t try to spin it. I appreciated that more than he probably knew. Everyone else would tell me it could be worse, it could be rebuilt, I should be grateful I was alive. All of which was true. None of which helped.
Bev brought the coffee. Two mugs, no questions about cream or sugar—she just set a small ceramic pitcher and a bowl of sugar packets between us and moved on. I gripped the mug and let the heat sink into my palms. The bandage on my right hand was already damp from condensation.
“Where are you staying?” Gabriel asked.
“Bev took me in last night. She has a spare room above the diner.” I wrapped both hands tighter around the mug. “Someone from the department called this morning—said the apartment’s on a separate electrical panel, no structural damage to the floor assembly. I can move back in today.”
“Good.” He nodded once. “That’s good.”
“It smells like smoke. Everything smells like smoke. But it’s mine and it’s standing and right now that’s enough.”
He didn’t answer that, but something shifted behind his eyes—a flicker of something that looked like concern pressed flat under control. He picked up his coffee and drank it black, no hesitation, like a man who’d been drinking bad coffee for fourteen years and had stopped noticing.
“What made you open a bakery in Whispering Pines?” he asked.
The question caught me off guard. People asked me that a lot—usually with a tone that suggested they couldn’t imagine why anyone would move to a town this small on purpose—but Gabriel asked it like he actually wanted the answer.
“It needed one,” I said. “I looked at a lot of small towns. Some of them already had bakeries, or they were too far from a main road to get foot traffic, or the rent was too high. Whispering Pines had the right combination of things. Tourist traffic in summer and winter, a Main Street that people actually walk down, and a lease I could almost afford.”
“Almost.”
“I made it work.” I took a sip of coffee.
It was good—better than mine, which was annoying.
“I put everything I had into the deposit, the equipment, the buildout. I did most of the interior work myself. The display case, the chalkboard, the tables—I sanded and refinished those tables on my apartment floor over two weekends.”
I was talking too much. I always talked too much when my brain was running from something—and right now it was running from two things at once. My kitchen was a blackened shell. And the man sitting across from me had carried me out of it like I weighed nothing.
I’d noticed that yesterday. The ease of it. The way he’d lifted me off the floor without breaking stride, without grunting or shifting or adjusting his grip. Like carrying me was the simplest thing he’d ever done.
Stop it, Brenna.
“You did the buildout yourself?” he asked.
“Most of it. I watched a lot of video tutorials. The countertop took me three tries.” I looked down at my coffee. “I’m not telling you this so you’ll feel sorry for me. I’m telling you because when people say ‘it can be rebuilt,’ I need them to understand what it cost the first time.”
The words came out harder than I intended. I braced for the polite retreat—the change of subject, the request for the check, the thanks for the company followed by a clean exit.
Gabriel didn’t move. His jaw eased. His shoulders dropped a fraction. He sat there holding his mug, his eyes steady on mine, and gave me one slow nod—the kind that said he didn’t just hear me, he understood.
“I rebuilt my house from studs,” he said. “Took me two years. Tore out every wall, rewired, replumbed, put it back together by hand. If someone burned it down and told me I was lucky because the foundation was still there, I’d want to hit them.”
The laugh escaped before I could stop it. It was short and rough and surprised us both.
“I’m not going to tell you it could be worse,” he said. “I’m not going to tell you to be grateful. You already know all of that. You knew it yesterday on the curb.”
My throat tightened. I picked up my coffee and drank so I wouldn’t have to respond immediately, because what I wanted to say was how did you know that?
What I wanted to ask was why are you sitting here?
What I was afraid of was that the answer to both questions would make me feel something I couldn’t afford to feel right now.
Bev appeared with two plates—scrambled eggs and toast for me, a stack of pancakes and bacon for Gabriel. She set them down and laid a hand on my shoulder, just briefly, just enough pressure to say I see you without making a production of it.
“You need anything else, you holler,” she said. Not to both of us. To me.
I nodded. She left, and I picked up my fork because it was easier than looking at Gabriel.
We ate without talking for a few minutes.
The eggs were good. The toast was buttered and warm and exactly the kind of simple, solid food that my body needed even though my brain kept insisting I wasn’t hungry.
I ate all of it and mopped up the eggs with the last corner of toast, and when I looked up, Gabriel was watching me with an expression I couldn’t quite read.
Not pity. I knew what pity looked like, and this wasn’t it.
“What?” I asked.
“Nothing.” He looked down at his plate. “Good to see you eat.”
My face went warm. Not a blush—I didn’t blush—but a flush of heat that started at my collarbone and climbed.
I busied myself with my coffee and tried to ignore the fact that this man, who I’d met yesterday morning while he was pulling me out of a fire, was sitting across from me in a diner eating pancakes like this was something he did.
Like this was normal. Like he planned to do it again.
That was the part I didn’t trust. Not him—he hadn’t given me a reason not to trust him.
What I didn’t trust was the idea that a man who looked like Gabriel Hall, who carried himself the way he did, who had the kind of quiet authority that made an entire fire crew defer to him without question, would look at me—smoke-stained, broke, sitting in an oversized sweatshirt with a bandaged hand and a bakery that was falling apart—and see something worth coming back for.
I’d been the girl people helped out of obligation.
The girl people were nice to because she was easy to be nice to—agreeable, grateful, never asked for too much.
I knew how to be useful. I knew how to make myself small enough to fit into whatever space was offered.
What I didn’t know was how to be the reason someone showed up.
Gabriel finished his pancakes, set his fork down, and looked at me again with those green eyes that didn’t wander, didn’t waver, didn’t check his phone or glance at the door. “Dec should be done by now. You want to go take a look?”
I didn’t. I wanted to sit in this booth and drink coffee and pretend my bakery was fine and this morning was just a morning and the man across from me was just being polite.
But that wasn’t how any of this worked.
“Yeah,” I said. “Let’s go.”
I reached for the check. Gabriel’s hand got there first—not grabbing it, just resting his fingers on the edge of the paper, his eyes on mine.
“You said I could buy my own breakfast,” I reminded him.
“I said I wouldn’t expect anything else.” The corner of his mouth moved—not quite a smile, but close. “I didn’t say I’d let you.”
He picked up the check and stood before I could argue, and I sat there for a second, watching him walk to the counter, and a warmth spread in my chest that I knew I should probably leave alone.
I didn’t leave it alone.
I grabbed my jacket and followed him out.