“Not necessary,” I say, and I mean it.
She nods, but her jaw is tight. Like the idea of owing something is physically uncomfortable. Like it’s a debt she’s going to be thinking about.
“I should go,” I say.
“Jasper likes it here,” the woman says. It’s not a question. It’s an observation. She’s still got her hand on my dog, who is apparently in a permanent state of contentment.
“Jasper likes everywhere,” I say. It’s a lie. Jasper likes few places. Jasper has never liked anywhere like this.
She smiles at that. She smiles like she knows I’m lying. “Well, he’s welcome to come back. I’ll owe you coffee or something.”
“You don’t owe me anything,” I say.
“Right,” she says, and she says it like she heard the words but she’s definitely not believing them. “I’m definitely not keeping a running list of every way you’ve helped me without being asked. That would be weird.”
She’s keeping a list? Of course she’s keeping a list. I can see it in her eyes—the compulsion to balance, to make everything transactional, to ensure nobody gives her anything without getting something equivalent in return.
I should tell her that I fixed the pump because that's what you do here. Because this is how Ashwood Falls works — people show up for each other even when they don't ask.
But I don’t. Because she’s not ready. Because she needs to do this her way, with her list and her compensation and her need to balance everything. Because some people have to learn that a kindness isn't a debt.
“I’ll be back for Jasper,” I say instead.
“Take your time,” she says. “He’s planning to lay here until I figure out the oven. We’re negotiating.”
I leave. I don’t watch her go back to talking to the appliance, though I want to. I don’t stand outside the window and watch my dog settle his head back on her foot. I go back to my truck and I drive home, and I think about what Edna used to say.
The bakery would find the right person.
Edna used to say that. Hank told me once, offhand, like it was a thing she believed — that the place would know. That it was waiting for someone specific. At the time I thought it was the kind of thing people say when they can't explain why they love something. Driving home, I'm not sure it's as ridiculous as I thought.
Like it’s an active thing. Like a building can decide. Like Edna left behind something that knows how to choose.
It’s ridiculous. But Hank believed in it, too. He believed that places had intentions. He believed that Edna’s bakery was waiting for something specific.
I wonder if she knows. If Gabby—with her mental ledger of debts and her burgundy stilettos and her deals with ovens—knows that she's not just trying to make a clause work. She's trying to fit into a place that's been waiting for her.
I wonder if she stays. Not just for sixty days, but after. If she figures out Lucifer and learns to bend it to her will, if she makes something beautiful in a building full of ghosts.
I wonder if that matters to me. If it should matter.
Jasper doesn’t come home until midnight. He walks back to the cabin on his own, which he’s never done before. He finds me in the workshop where I’m making a bench that nobody asked for out of wood that I've had since Hank died. He puts his head on my leg and he smells like sugar and flour and her soap.
He smells like home; except he wasn’t home. He was at her place.
Tomorrow I won’t drive past the cabin. Tomorrow I’ll stay in the workshop, and I’ll make furniture for people who can pay for it and I won’t think about a woman who makes deals with ovens or keeps lists.
Tomorrow I’ll do what I always do.
Today, though, I sit with my dog, and I think about Hank’s voice saying something about Edna always knowing. Something about the bakery finding its person.
And I wonder what it means if I think she might be right.
Chapter 5
Gabby
The cast iron beast sits in the center of Sugar & Flour's kitchen like an altar to chaos, and I've been staring at it for twenty minutes while my croissant dough rests in the fridge.