The next few days blur together — planning, stretching my hand, testing my grip on every tool in Ash's kitchen. By Sunday, I can close my fist almost all the way. The half-inch gap is down to a quarter.
Vaughn leaves at 6:30 for a canyon run with the guys. I'm still half-asleep when he kisses my forehead.
"Don't die."
"Solid advice."
"Bring me green salsa."
"Already texted Jason."
"I love you." Muffled. Automatic. The kind of thing you say when it's become as natural as breathing and you don't need to make it a moment.
"Love you too. Lock the door."
I hear bikes — five of them, rumbling to life in the driveway and fading into the morning. Then quiet. The house is mine.
I make coffee. Too sweet, too creamy, exactly right. Sit at Ash's kitchen table with my business books and a notebook and my healing hand wrapped around the mug.
The café space is still behind my eyes. The counter, the pass-through window, the light. Vaughn watching me talk about ovens and espresso machines while the whole pride stood around pretending they weren't emotional.
I start sketching. Menu items first — the croissants, the savory Danish, the hand pies. Then layout. Then a rough timeline: permits, equipment, renovation, opening.
By ten I've filled six pages and eaten an entire bag of chips and texted Toby four times about equipment pricing. Toby texts back spreadsheets. Of course he does.
Then I look at the kitchen. Ash's kitchen, which has become mine over the past weeks — my flour in the canister, my chocolate in the pantry, my butter taking up an entire shelf of the fridge because Kerrygold doesn't come in small quantities.
I could plan. Or I could bake.
The hand says no. The rest of me says yes.
I start simple. Brown butter cookies — the recipe I know so well I could make it in my sleep, the one I've been baking for story hour for months. The butter goes in the pan. I stir with my right hand, but my left hand holds the pan handle, and the grip is shaky but it holds. The scar pulls. I let it.
Flour, sugar, eggs. My right hand does the heavy work — cracking, measuring, mixing. My left hand assists. Holds the bowl steady. Steadies the mixer. It's clumsy. It's slow. It's nothing like the fluid, two-handed precision that used to define me in a kitchen.
It's the best baking I've ever done.
Because I'm baking for no one. Not for Gordon's approval. Not to prove I deserve a kitchen. Not as performance or survival or a way to say things my mouth can't manage. I'm standing in a sunny kitchen on a Sunday morning making cookies because I want to, and the only person who needs to think they're good enough is me.
The dough comes together. I scoop it onto the sheet pan — uneven, because my left hand can't stabilize the scoop yet, butclose enough. The oven is already warm. I slide the pan in and set the timer and stand there watching through the glass like I haven't watched a thousand batches bake before this one.
Vaughn texts a photo of Jason surrounded by pancakes at the mountain diner.
Adorable,I send back.
Miss you.
The timer goes off. I pull the pan out — both hands, right hand dominant, left hand steadying. The cookies are golden brown at the edges, soft in the center, the brown butter giving them that deep, nutty warmth that you can smell from across a room.
I eat one standing at the counter. It's perfect. Or close enough to perfect that the difference doesn't matter.
I make a second batch. Then a third, because the hand is loosening up and the kitchen smells like butter and sugar and home and I don't want to stop. I try piping with my left hand — shaky, uneven, but functional. I try chopping chocolate — slow, careful, the knife grip not quite right but the pieces falling where they should.
By afternoon the kitchen counter is covered. Brown butter cookies, a batch of shortbread, a tray of rough croissants that Toby helped with earlier in the week and I'm reheating now because they still taste incredible. I've gone through a pound of butter and I don't care.
This is the life, I think. This quiet. This ordinary. A man who rides motorcycles with his pride and texts me photos from a pancake restaurant and will come home smelling like wind andengine oil and pull me against his chest and ask about my day. A café with my name on the door. A hand that's healing. A future that didn't exist three weeks ago.
This is the life. And I get to have it.