Chapter 2 #2
I stood there for a moment, waiting for something. I don't know what. Acknowledgment, maybe. A glance. Some small indication that I was more than furniture in my own house.
Emma looked up. "Oh, these are homemade? That's so thoughtful."
"Family recipe," I heard myself say. "Let me know if you need anything else."
I walked back to the kitchen. Behind me, I heard Marcus murmur something to Emma, heard her low laugh in response.
The coffee sat untouched when I cleared it two hours later.
Evening came slowly, the way it does in early fall. The light went golden, then amber, then the deep blue of twilight. I served dinner to the guests, including Mrs. Patterson, who ate in unusual silence and kept glancing toward the sunroom, where Marcus and Emma were still working.
They'd ordered takeout. Thai food, delivered from the place in town. Marcus hadn't mentioned they were skipping dinner until the delivery driver was already at the door.
“We're in the groove,” he'd said when I brought them plates and silverware anyway. “Don't want to break momentum.”
I'd set the table in the sunroom while they barely looked up, arranged everything just so, and retreated to eat alone in the kitchen.
The house settled around me as the night deepened.
Guests retired to their rooms. Elena had gone home hours ago.
Marcus and Emma had finally stopped working.
I'd heard them say good night in the hallway around ten, heard the separate clicks of two doors closing.
His door. Then hers. I'd let myself exhale.
I cleaned the kitchen. Washed dishes that didn't need washing. Wiped counters I'd already wiped twice. Anything to keep my hands moving, to keep the thoughts at bay.
Then I heard it.
Laughter. Marcus's laugh, low and warm, was coming from somewhere upstairs. And underneath it, Emma's voice, saying something I couldn't make out.
My feet carried me to the bottom of the stairs before I realized I was moving.
I stood there in the dark hallway, one hand on the banister Gran had polished every Sunday for thirty years. The laughter came again. From Emma's room. Marcus's laugh, in Emma's room, at eleven o'clock at night.
I'd heard them go to their separate rooms. I'd heard both doors close. So why was he in there now? What had changed in the hour since they'd said good night?
Everything inside me went still.
This was my house. My grandmother's house.
Three generations of women had built lives within these walls.
And Marcus was up there laughing with another woman, like I was invisible.
Like I didn't exist. Like the eleven years we'd built together were worth less than whatever was happening behind that closed door.
I could confront them. I could bang on that door and watch them scramble, watch Marcus fumble for an excuse, watch Emma's polished composure crack. I could scream and cry and make a scene worthy of the betrayal.
But then what? He'd deny it. Or he'd apologize, all soft words and wounded eyes, and I'd spend the next six months wondering if I'd overreacted.
Wondering if laughter was really proof of anything.
Wondering if I was the crazy one, the jealous one, the woman who couldn't handle her fiancé having a female colleague.
I'd watched my mother do that. Confront, forgive, doubt herself, repeat.
I wouldn't be her.
I turned and walked back to the kitchen.
Two in the morning found me where it always did: hands deep in dough, flour dusting the counter, the oven warming the room against the autumn chill.
I didn't need more cinnamon rolls. I'd made two batches already this week.
I had frozen half of them because there was no way the guests would eat this many.
But my hands needed the work, needed the familiar rhythm of press and fold and turn.
The kitchen was the only place the noise in my head went quiet.
Gran used to say that bread was honest. You can't lie to dough, she'd told me once, her hands showing mine the proper technique. It knows if you're rushing. It knows if you're scared. You have to be present with it, or it won't rise right.
I'd been baking bread since I was eight years old. It was the only thing that had held me together when Mom fell apart, when Dad left, when Gran got sick and then got better and then got sick again for the last time. The kitchen had saved me. Always did.
I pressed my knuckles into the dough and thought about my mother.
She'd loved too much. That was what Gran always said.
Loved a man who promised stability and delivered chaos, who charmed her into a life she never wanted and then abandoned her when it got hard.
Mom had spent years trying to shrink herself small enough to fit into the space he left for her.
By the time he walked out, there was barely anything left.
I was twelve when he left. Twelve, when I watched my mother crumble. Twelve, when Gran drove four hours to collect us and bring us here, to this kitchen, to this house that had never failed anyone.
“Don't let a man make you small,” Gran had said the night we arrived.
I was crying at the kitchen table, and she was making hot chocolate, and outside, the snow was falling like the world was trying to start over.
“You come from strong women, Grace. We bend, but we don't break. And we never, ever disappear.”
I looked up at her portrait above the doorway. Margaret Eleanor Hayes, 1942–2019. Stern mouth. Kind eyes. The woman who built this place with her own hands after Grandpa died young and left her with nothing but debt and determination.
She'd run this B&B alone for thirty years. Raised my mother here, then raised me when my mother couldn't. She'd taught me what love should feel like. Additive. Never hollow. That the right person would make you feel more like yourself, not less.
When had Marcus stopped making me feel like myself?
When had I stopped noticing?
The dough was ready. I shaped it into rolls with hands that had stopped shaking somewhere around the second hour of kneading. Outside the window, the sky was still black, but I could feel the dawn coming—the faint shift in the darkness that meant morning wasn’t far.
I covered the rolls and set them aside to rise. Washed my hands. Stood at the sink and stared at my reflection in the dark window.
The woman looking back at me was someone I barely recognized. Tired eyes. A mouth held too tight, like it had forgotten how to rest. The posture of someone who’d spent years folding herself into smaller and smaller shapes, learning how to fit into smaller and smaller spaces.
I didn’t remember when it started.
But I knew that I was tired of holding my breath.