Chapter 6 Grace
Grace
Three weeks, and I was still moving through the days like a ghost.
I woke at four every morning, the same way I had since Marcus left.
Sleep came in fragments now, shallow and restless, full of dreams I couldn't quite remember but that left me feeling hollowed out.
By the time the sun started to lighten the sky, I'd already given up on rest and made my way downstairs to the kitchen.
The routine saved me. Sifting, stirring, watching the dough rise and fall.
The familiar alchemy of flour and butter and heat.
Muscle memory took over when my mind couldn't be trusted.
I didn't have to think about Marcus when I was counting teaspoons of cinnamon.
Didn't have to feel the emptiness when my hands were busy shaping rolls.
The kitchen was the only place that made sense, at least in my head.
Most mornings, the rhythm held. But sometimes my hands would pause mid-knead, remembering the time Marcus had tried to help me make bread for Thanksgiving.
He'd gotten flour everywhere, in his hair, on his expensive watch, and laughed about it.
Really laughed, the way he used to before work consumed him.
Or I'd pull cinnamon rolls from the oven and think about the morning he'd surprised me by getting up early to make breakfast, burning the bacon but trying anyway.
Those moments made it worse somehow. Easier to grieve someone who'd been all bad.
Harder when you had to reconcile the good parts with the man who'd walked away without looking back.
I served breakfast with a smile that didn't reach my eyes.
The guests didn't seem to notice, or maybe they were too polite to say anything.
Mrs. Patterson noticed. She always did. But she didn't push.
Just watched me with those sharp, kind eyes and made sure to compliment the pastries every morning, as if reminding me that I was still capable of making good things.
Elena picked up extra shifts without being asked.
She'd appear at seven instead of eight, already tying on her apron, already prepping vegetables for the next day's breakfast. When I disappeared to cry in the pantry, she'd cover the front desk and pretend she hadn't heard anything when I came back with red eyes and a fresh cup of tea.
“Take your time,” she'd say. Nothing else. Just that.
I didn't know how to thank her. Didn't have the words. So I just kept showing up, kept going through the motions, kept pretending I was holding it together when we both knew I wasn't.
Owen came by every few days.
Sometimes he brought groceries. Not takeout, nothing fancy.
Just the basics I kept forgetting to buy.
Eggs, bread, and the good coffee from the roaster in town.
He'd unpack the bags without asking where things went, because he already knew this kitchen almost as well as I did.
One evening, he showed up with soup from the diner, the chicken noodle Mrs. Hendricks had been making since we were kids.
“You need to eat,” he said, setting the container in front of me.
“I'm not hungry.”
“I know.” He handed me a spoon anyway. “Eat it anyway.”
I did. Not because I wanted to, but because he’d driven twenty minutes to get it, and refusing felt harder than eating.
Sometimes he brought his toolbox. Fixed things that didn't need fixing. Tightened hinges, replaced lightbulbs, and checked the pipes under the sink. I think he needed the work as much as I needed the company.
We talked, but not about Marcus. Not about the things that mattered.
Owen would tell me about calls at the station, the probie who'd nearly driven the engine into a ditch, the cat Cal's crew had rescued from a storm drain.
I'd tell him about the guest who complained that the pillows were too soft.
Small things. Safe things. The kind of conversation that filled the silence without asking anything of either of us.
Sometimes, though, the real stuff slipped through.
“Do you think I missed the signs?” I asked one night, staring into my tea. “With Marcus. Do you think I should have seen it coming?”
Owen was quiet for a moment. “I think people show you who they are. And sometimes you're not ready to see it.”
He took a sip of his beer. “I don't think it's your fault, Grace. If that's what you're asking.”
I wasn't sure it was. But it helped to hear him say it.
Two broken people, sitting together, with nothing he could fix and nowhere else to be.
The nausea started small.
A wave of queasiness when I smelled coffee brewing. A turning in my stomach when I bent over to pull rolls from the oven. I blamed stress. Blamed the fact that I hadn’t been eating, hadn’t been sleeping, hadn’t been doing much of anything except surviving from one hour to the next.
But it kept coming.
Morning after morning, I'd wake with my stomach churning. I'd make it through the first batch of baking, set out breakfast for the guests, and then find myself bent over the toilet in the bathroom off the kitchen, heaving up nothing because there was nothing left to heave.
One morning, I didn't make it to the bathroom in time. I barely made it to the sink before everything came up, my body shaking, my eyes watering, the smell of burning cinnamon rolls filling the kitchen because I'd forgotten to set the timer.
Elena found me there. Gripping the edge of the sink, trembling, the ruined rolls smoking in the oven behind me.
She didn't hesitate. Just turned off the oven, opened the window to let out the smoke, and guided me to the kitchen table with a hand on my back. She filled a glass of water and set it in front of me, then sat down across the table, her eyes never leaving my face.
“Grace.” Her voice was firm but kind. “This is the third morning this week.”
I wrapped my hands around the glass. “I know.”
“You're not eating. You're barely sleeping. And now this.” She gestured toward the sink, the window, the mess I'd made. “I'm worried about you.”
“I'm fine. It's just stress.”
Elena raised an eyebrow. She'd been through her own hard years. She knew what stress looked like, and she knew what denial looked like too.
“Honey.” She reached across the table and covered my hand with hers. “I've been where you are. After my divorce, I thought I could just push through. Told myself I was fine when I was anything but. It doesn't work. Trust me.”
I stared at our hands. Hers, weathered and warm. Mine, cold and shaking.
“Have you seen a doctor?” she asked gently.
I shook my head.
“Maybe it's time.” She squeezed my fingers. “Whatever's going on, you don't have to figure it out alone. But you do have to take care of yourself. This place needs you. I need you.” A small smile. “Who else is going to burn the cinnamon rolls if you're not here?”
That made me chuckle.
“I will,” I said.
Elena nodded, but her eyes said she wasn't going to let this go. “I'm here. Whatever you need. Even if it's just someone to hold your hair back.” She squeezed my hand once more, then stood. “Now. Let me make you some toast. Plain. No butter. See if we can get something to stay down.”
I didn't argue. I just sat there, letting someone take care of me for the first time in weeks, and tried not to cry.
My period was three weeks late. I'd noticed a few days ago, counted backward on the calendar, and felt the floor drop out from under me. The last time Marcus and I had been together. Before everything fractured.
The timeline aligned with cruel precision.
I drove to the pharmacy in Millbrook, forty minutes away. Far enough that no one would know me. Enough distance that I wouldn’t run into anyone from town, wouldn’t have to explain why I was buying what I was buying.
The store was bright and sterile, fluorescent lights humming overhead. I walked past the cold medicine, past the bandages, past the vitamins, until I found the aisle I was looking for. Pregnancy tests lined the shelf in neat rows. Different brands, different prices, different promises of accuracy.
I grabbed two. Different brands, as if that would change anything.
The teenager at the register didn't look twice at me. Just scanned the boxes, told me the total, and handed me my change. I paid in cash, like I couldn’t leave a trace. Maybe I was. Maybe I was about to uncover something that would change everything.
The drive home took forever.
My hands shook on the steering wheel. The tests sat on the passenger seat in a brown paper bag, accusing. I kept glancing at them, as if they might disappear, as if this might all turn out to be a dream I could wake up from.
I thought about my mother. Pregnant at twenty-two with a man who promised her the world and delivered nothing but heartbreak.
She'd been so young, so hopeful, so sure that love would be enough.
I remembered the photos Gran kept in the hallway—Mom glowing, hand on her belly, Dad's arm around her shoulders.
They looked happy. They looked like people who had figured it out.
And then Dad left. Mom spent the following years trying to hold herself together with nothing but pride and denial. Trying to be both parents at once. Failing, slowly, until Gran had to step in and pick up the pieces.
I gripped the steering wheel tighter.
Gran's voice echoed in my head, the way it always did when I needed her most. History doesn't have to repeat itself, girl. You get to write your own story.
But I didn't feel like the author right now.
I felt like a character someone else was writing, trapped in a plot that didn’t feel like mine. Every choice I'd made, every path I'd taken, and somehow I'd ended up here anyway. Alone. Scared. Driving home with two pregnancy tests and a future I couldn't see.
The B&B appeared around the final curve, white and solid against the afternoon sky. Home. The only place that had never let me down.