31. Karissa
Chapter thirty-one
Karissa
The new oven hums like it has somewhere to be.
I made Paul Setti take back the one Noah bought after the fight. This one I financed myself, eleven months at a number that makes my stomach hurt every time I think about it too long. It's mine. Every bolt.
That's the whole point.
The bell above the front door doesn't ring. Nobody's here but me and the mixer and the sound of my own breathing.
I've missed this. The bakery before it belonged to anyone else's story.
Two weeks since the donor lunch. Two weeks since I told him his absence was the real failure, not just Diane's cruelty. I walked out into the cold without looking back once, which took more discipline than anything else I did that day.
I have not looked back since either. Nobody warns you about that. The not looking back is a full-time job.
Marcus notices before anyone else does. He always does.
"You're doing the thing," he says, watching me pull a tray of croissants that are objectively fine and start again anyway.
"What thing."
"The thing where you make everything twice because it's easier than sitting still."
I don't answer him. I put the first batch in the case for the morning rush and start a second one nobody asked for.
The morning rush comes and goes the way it used to before any of it. Regulars. A stroller parked crooked by the window. Someone's dog tied to the bike rack outside, patient, and unbothered.
Nobody asks me about Noah Easton anymore. The story moved on to somebody else's scandal a while ago, the way stories do. I catch myself grateful for it and then hating that I'm grateful, because it means some part of me is still counting.
I balance the books that night the way I always have. My handwriting, my columns, my math. Diego's invoice paid in full, on time, no favors owed to anyone. The number at the bottom is small but it's honest, and it's entirely mine.
I used to think that was enough. I'm finding out it's necessary, but it isn't the same as enough.
Theo comes down for a snack around 9:00 p.m. and finds me at the counter with the ledger open and my third cup of decaf going cold beside it.
"You've redone the schedule four times this week," he says, not looking up from the fridge.
"The schedule needed redoing."
"The schedule was fine on Tuesday." He grabs the orange juice, drinks straight from the carton, which I've told him nine hundred times not to do, and I don't even have the energy to fight it tonight. "You redid it because you needed something to stare at that wasn't your phone."
I close the ledger a little harder than I need to.
"I'm handling it, Theo."
"I know you are." He says it easy, no edge to it, which makes it worse anyway. "You always handle it. That's not the thing I'm worried about."
"Then what's the thing."
He shrugs, leaning against the counter like he's got all night, which he does, because school's nearly out and I've stopped fighting him about bedtime lately too.
"You handled it before him," he says. "You're handling it now. But you didn't used to look like this while you were doing it."
I want to ask him what I look like. I already know I don't want the answer.
I go up to bed and don't sleep, which has become the pattern rather than the exception. I lie there and do the thing I told myself I'd stop doing, which is replaying the elevator. Not the donor lunch. Not the fight about the oven or the debt or any of the reasons I was right to walk away.
The elevator. The dark. Him telling me about a daughter I never met, his voice doing something I hadn't heard it do before or since.
That's the version I let myself have with the lights on.
In the dark it's the rest of it. His hand at the small of my back on that dance floor, the one that found me and stayed a beat too long. The weight of him behind me in the stalled elevator, close enough that the heat came off him, both of us pretending it was the only reason neither of us moved.
I press my palm flat against my stomach and hate how easily it comes back. His mouth at the corner of my jaw the night I stayed. The sound he made when all that careful, terrible control finally gave out, when he stopped running the moment and just wanted me.
My hand slides lower and I let it.
I'm furious with him. I keep a whole ledger of reasons and every one of them is correct, and not one of them does anything for the ache that's been sitting under my ribs for two weeks.
His hands were never the problem. His hands always knew exactly what they were doing. It was everything behind them I couldn't trust.
I borrow them. I touch myself slow, the way I remember him, and it's his name I don't say out loud in the dark.
The pressure builds and then stops being slow at all.
I bite down on the inside of my cheek to keep the sound mine, to keep Theo two rooms over asleep, to keep this the one thing tonight I don't owe anyone an explanation for.
When it breaks, it breaks clean. For about four seconds my mind goes quiet.
Then it all comes back.
I don't miss the money. I want to be clear with myself about that, lying awake with nobody around to perform for. I don't miss the events or the dresses or the way a room changes when he walks into it.
I miss the fifteen minutes after the world went quiet, when it was just him telling me something true.
That's the part I can't file away as fake. That's what keeps me up. The wanting I can manage. I've managed worse. It's the missing I don't have a system for.
The nights start to blur together. I open, I bake, I close, I lie awake, and then I do it all again.
On one of them I finish the closing routine alone. Lights off in the front, ovens cooling, the register counted twice out of habit rather than necessity.
I stand in the empty kitchen for a minute before I go upstairs, the way I used to before any of this started, back when the only thing keeping me up at night was Diego's invoice and Theo's tuition and whether the walk-in would make it another year.
I built this. All of it. Before Noah, during Noah, and now, apparently, after him too.
That should feel like enough.
I don't go up. I cross to the new oven instead and turn it back on, and there's no reason for it that would survive being said out loud.
Nothing to bake at this hour. No order waiting on me.
I just want to stand in front of the one thing in this building that's mine down to the last bolt and watch it come alive.
The dial climbs. The racks warm and begin to glow, orange and empty and clean.
I have my phone out before I've decided to reach for it. I frame the open door and the light inside.
No words. No reason. I send it to Noah anyway, and then I stand in the dark and wait to find out what I've done.