Chapter 3 What the Mirror Doesnt Say
The bread was not going to bake itself.
Anya discovered this at half past seven, standing in the opera house kitchen in her socks and one of Cassian's old Oxford shirts — the grey one with the fraying second button that his housekeeper, Mrs. Adler, had been threatening to replace for six months — holding a copy of a recipe she'd written in her own handwriting on a card she'd found at the market two weeks ago.
The card was cream-coloured, with a small printed sheaf of wheat in the corner that she found disproportionately charming.
The recipe was for a Bavarian Bauernbrot — a farmhouse sourdough — and she had been meaning to attempt it since approximately the day she'd arrived.
Today, she decided. Today was the day.
She tied her hair up with the elastic she kept around her wrist, pushed the sleeves of the shirt to her elbows, and began.
The kitchen in the opera house was not the kitchen of a person who cooked.
It was the kitchen of a person who had hired, at some expense, someone who understood kitchens.
The range was a La Cornue in a blue so deep it was almost black, the sort of colour that made you feel slightly guilty for using it to make toast. The copper pots hanging above the central island were almost certainly decorative — they had the bright, unscratched gleam of things that had never been asked to boil anything.
But the equipment was there, serious and waiting, and Anya had learned in the past months that the kitchen would cooperate if she approached it respectfully, the way you approach someone else's extremely well-organised desk.
She had found the starter culture in the village.
A woman at the far end of the market, eighty years old at minimum and operating from behind a trestle table that looked like it had been there since the founding of the valley, had handed it over in a small glass jar with a handwritten label that simply said Hilde — presumably either the woman's name or the starter's, and Anya had not been entirely sure which.
She'd kept it in the back of the larder ever since, feeding it with the diligent regularity she'd previously reserved for Petra's five-thirty snack schedule, and this morning it had the right smell and the right buoyancy and the right slightly accusatory look of something that was ready to do its work.
She began measuring flour.
This was the thing about baking that she had never been able to explain to people who didn't do it — the specific mercy of having something physical to manage.
The weight of flour in the bowl. The cool slide of water through her fingers.
The satisfaction of the dough beginning to pull away from the sides of the basin and form itself into something coherent.
Her mother had known this, had built an entire business around it, had stood in their kitchen in Derbyshire at six in the morning four days a week for twenty-three years doing exactly this: finding the day by making something with her hands first.
Anya worked the dough with her palms, pressing and folding, and the kitchen filled with the faint fermented warmth of the starter, and for approximately thirty-five minutes, she felt like herself in a way that had nothing to do with Cassian Sterling or his opera house or the ring on her finger that still, two months on, occasionally caught her off guard.
She left the dough to prove and washed her hands at the deep ceramic sink, watching through the window as the valley below the estate began its morning.
The Bavarian autumn was doing something extraordinary with the light — the low sun coming in at an angle that turned the hillside vineyards the colour of old copper wire, the village below just visible as a cluster of pale walls and dark rooftiles through the poplars at the lane's end.
She had not expected to love it here as much as she did.
She had expected to find it beautiful in a dutiful, tourist way — the way you admire a famous painting in a gallery, acknowledging its value while remaining fundamentally unmoved.
Instead she had found herself moved constantly and slightly against her will, by the light especially, and by the smallness of the valley, and by the fact that when she walked to the market in the mornings people were beginning to recognise her.
Not as Cassian Sterling's fiancée. Just as the woman who came on Tuesdays with the big wicker basket and bought the dark rye bread and always spent too long at the honey stall.
She thought that might be the most quietly radical thing that had happened to her this year.
By ten o'clock the dough had risen to exactly where she wanted it, the morning had settled into its proper shape, and Anya had changed into her coat and her good boots — the brown leather ankle boots she'd had since her second year at university, resoled twice and still going — and was making her way down the narrow cobblestone lane toward the valley.
The lane ran along the eastern edge of the estate, past a stone wall so old it had begun to grow its own ecosystem in the cracks — pale lichen, tiny ferns, something purple she'd been meaning to identify — and then through a gate at the bottom that led to the village road.
It was a fifteen-minute walk at her pace, twenty if she stopped to look at things, which she almost always did.
Today she stopped twice: once for a kestrel sitting on the gatepost with the magnificent indifference of a creature that owned the airspace, and once for the view from the first bend in the road, where the valley opened up and the morning mist was still sitting in the low places between the vines, pale and unhurried.
She was happy.
She noticed the happiness the way she'd been noticing it lately — with a small accompanying jolt of recognition, as if it were a stranger she kept passing in the street.
Oh, she would think, you again. It was not the anxious, performative happiness of someone waiting to be caught out.
It was quieter than that. It was the happiness of dough rising correctly and a kestrel on a gatepost and knowing that when she got home there would be coffee and probably Cassian in the kitchen doing the crossword wrong, and that this was, somehow, her actual life.
Her mother called at the fountain.
Anya had settled onto the stone bench at the market's edge, her basket on her lap, three small things already purchased — a pot of the dark wildflower honey, a bunch of the short-stemmed dahlias in orange and rust that she'd been buying weekly since September, and a wedge of the hard mountain cheese that Petra had decided was the only acceptable thing to eat at lunchtime.
Her phone buzzed, and the video call opened to show her mother in the Derbyshire kitchen — the new kitchen, rebuilt since the bakery expansion, though it still had the same yellow light fittings her parents had chosen in 2003 and had never gotten around to replacing.
Her mother's face was the face of someone who had been up since five and had already accomplished a great deal and found this unremarkable.
"There's my girl," her mother said.
"Mum." Anya turned the phone to show the fountain, the market stalls, the pale blue sky above the church roof. "Look at my Tuesday."
"Mm." Her mother's expression was the particular fond-but-appraising look of a woman who loved her daughter and was not yet sure about anything else. "It's very beautiful. Are those dahlias?"
"From the stall by the butcher. He gives me an extra one now because I told him they were good."
"You've always been a charmer," her mother said, which was not entirely true and they both knew it. "How are the children?"
"At school. Petra has a project about beetles, which means there are drawings of beetles on every available surface. Felix is doing a thing with a recorder that is testing everyone's goodwill."
"And him?"
There was no particular inflection on him — her mother was scrupulously, almost exaggeratedly neutral about Cassian, which Anya suspected was its own kind of opinion. "He's fine," Anya said. "He's — good, I think. Working."
"Always working."
"Mum."
"I didn't say anything."
The market moved around her while they talked — a woman wheeling a pram, two old men debating something at the bread stall with the intensity of people discussing geopolitics, a dog stretched philosophically across the cobblestones in a patch of sun.
Anya balanced the phone on her knee and began retying the string around the honey pot, which had come loose.
The conversation moved through the bakery expansion — going well, her mother had taken on another Saturday person, the almond croissants were apparently a sensation — and through her brother Marcus's new flat and some family news about a cousin she barely knew and then, with the gentle inevitability of water finding a crack, to the question.
"I've been thinking," her mother said, with the small pause that preceded her thinking out loud, "about your degree."
Anya went still for a half-second, then continued with the string. "What about it?"
"You've been over there — what, six months now?"
"Seven."
"Seven months. And I know you're happy." A small beat. "You said you're happy."
"I am happy."
"I know. But happy isn't a plan, sweetheart.
" Her mother's voice was not unkind — it was never unkind, which was part of what made it so difficult to argue with.
"You have a First in developmental psychology, and a master's in English literature from Goldsmiths you never did a thing with.
You wrote a thesis on early childhood attachment that your professor — what was his name —"
"Dr. Osei."