"We'll workshop the name."
"Obviously." I look at Vaughn. "What do you need?"
"What do I—"
"What do you need from me? For this to work. For us to work while I'm doing this."
He's quiet for a moment. Then: "I need you to ask for help when you need it. Not after. Not when it's an emergency. When you need it."
"I can try."
"That's enough." He pulls me close, careful of my hand. "That's always been enough."
"Also more butter," I add. "I need a lot more butter."
"I'll go to the store," Jason says. "I know where the restaurant supply place is."
"Kerrygold if they have it. Plugra if they don't."
"He's so specific," Jason tells Vaughn. "I love it."
They leave for butter. Toby keeps writing. I stand in Ash's flour-covered kitchen with the smell of perfect croissants and the beginning of a plan and the unfamiliar, terrifying, extraordinary feeling of not doing this alone.
Chapter 22
Vaughn
Robin is on the garage couch with four business books, a highlighter, and a system of color-coded post-it notes that Toby taught him. Pink for finances, blue for legal, green for recipes, yellow for marketing.
He's wearing one of my shirts — it hangs loose on him, sleeves rolled up — and his bandaged hand is propped on a pillow. Every few minutes he tries to hold a book open and write at the same time, swears, and props the book under a couch cushion instead.
"Did you know the average bakery needs between fifty and eighty thousand in initial investment?" he says without looking up.
"That's a lot of croissants," Silas observes from under his carburetor rebuild.
"Approximately sixteen thousand at five dollars each. Or ten thousand at eight for specialty items."
"You did that in your head?" Ezra sounds impressed from under his own bike.
"Recipe ratios. Math is math." Robin photographs a page with his phone, one-handed. "This book says location is everything. Foot traffic, parking, neighborhood demographics. You need a minimum of eight hundred people passing your storefront daily for a walk-in bakery model."
Robin flips a page, frustrated. "The numbers on a standalone bakery are brutal. Storefront lease alone would eat half the startup budget."
I tighten a bolt on the exhaust system. Glance over at him. The light catches in his hair. He's biting his lip — the concentration face, the one that means his brain is running faster than his mouth, which is saying something.
He stops on a page. Reads it twice. "Huh. This chapter's about alternative models. Café spaces inside existing businesses — bookstores, gyms, co-working spaces. Lower overhead because you piggyback on existing foot traffic and shared infrastructure."
He photographs the page and keeps reading. I go back to the exhaust.
The garage door bangs open.
Toby is standing there, flushed, out of breath, vibrating with the specific energy of a man who has news and cannot physically contain it for one more second. Knox is behind him, looking like he was mid-sentence when Toby bolted.
"ROBIN."
Robin looks up from his book. "What? What happened? Are you okay?"
Knox reaches for Toby's arm. "Babe, I was trying to—"