"He's gone," Piper announces.
"He'll be back," I say.
"Probably." She hops off the stool and collects her bag. "These are excellent, by the way. The croissants. Tessa's going to lose her mind."
She leaves, and the kitchen settles back into its particular quiet — just Lucifer's ticking and the smell of butter and the fog circle Morris left on the glass, slowly fading.
That evening, after I close up, I flip through Edna's journal looking for—I'm not sure what. Comfort? Evidence that other people have catastrophic kitchen moments? Proof that moving to a remote Alaskan village and naming your oven was a reasonable decision? The journal is leather-bound and worn, filled with entries in her precise, careful handwriting. Some entries are long and philosophical. Others are a few lines. Tonight, I'm looking for the disasters.
I find, instead, this entry, dated March 14, 1987:
Burned an entire batch tonight—the first one I've done in months. Ruined them completely. Black discs of failure. Hank came in, took one look at the wreckage, and sat down at the kitchen table. I thought he'd tell me I was losing my touch, that maybe I was getting too old, that I should let someone younger take over. Instead, he took one of the ruined ones and started eating it, slow and steady, like it was the finest thing he'd ever tasted. Didn't say a word. Just ate three of them, asked for more coffee, and kissed my temple. I cried so hard I could barely see. This is what love is, I think. Someone eating your failures like they're victories. Someone sitting with you in the wreckage and deciding that your presence matters more than the outcome.
I read it three times, each time the words hitting a little differently.
My throat gets tight. Something about partnership. About being seen. About what I’m not ready to understand.
Edna burned things. Edna had panic moments. Edna created disasters and someone loved her through them—not despite them, but through them. He sat down. He ate the failure. He made it clear that the failure didn't change anything.
That's not how it worked with Marco. Marco kept notes for my mistakes. He had a color-coded system for tracking my failures. He would bring them up years later as evidence of some fundamental flaw in my character. He never sat down and ate the ruined batch. He never kissed my temple and made it mean something other than what it was.
I set the journal down carefully on the counter and press my palms against my eyes, right there in the empty kitchen with thecooling ovens and the lingering smell of dill and butter and the ghost of Morris's foggy nose print on the window.
Outside, somewhere in the Alaskan darkness, Morris is probably doing moose things. Completely forgetting he startled me. Probably living his best moose life with zero anxiety about his life choices, zero knowledge that I'm inside a kitchen having an emotional crisis triggered by both a moose and a dead woman's life philosophy.
I should aspire to be a moose.
Instead, I think about Hank eating burned croissants like they were the most important thing he'd ever tasted, and something shifts in my chest that I'm not prepared to examine. It's tender and raw and suggests that maybe I've been thinking about love all wrong. Maybe love isn't a show. Maybe love is just—someone staying. Someone eating the disaster. Someone deciding that you're worth the trouble.
I stay in the kitchen until ten, making salmon croissants like someone's life depends on it. Twenty-three total. All of them, as Jace would say, ‘right’. All of them reminders that my hands still know what they're doing even when the rest of me is less certain.
When I'm wiping down Lucifer's face at the end of the night, I wrap one of the croissants in wax paper without really deciding to, set it on the counter, and stare at it.
Jace installed the temperature gauge that made these possible. I’ll give him this one. That's all this is — a practical acknowledgment of a practical fact. The ledger keeping me honest.
I pick up my ledger and set it by the door for the morning.
I don't examine it any further than that. Some things are better left in the column where they landed.
Chapter 8
Jace
Dotty corners me at her café counter on a Wednesday morning when I’ve made the mistake of ordering coffee while it’s not yet 7 AM. My guard is down. She knows this. She’s weaponizing my caffeine dependency like a professional.
I’m here to pick up the key I left behind yesterday after fixing the walk-in cooler. Quick trip. In and out. Except Dotty has other plans, and she’s blocking the counter space with the precision of someone who’s thought this through.
She slides my coffee across the counter. Dark roast. Black. The care you’d use for something that might explode.
“You’ve fixed that oven four times,” she says, not looking up from the espresso machine she’s aggressively cleaning. “In the past month. It didn’t break four times.”
I take a sip. The coffee is perfect. Dotty’s coffee is always perfect, which makes her commentary harder to dismiss as simple business owner gossip. This is someone who pays attention to details.
“Oven was faulty,” I say, which is technically true. It was faulty. The initial inspection revealed a temperature calibrationissue that needed addressing. “The thermostat wasn’t reading properly. Could’ve caused real damage.”
“Right,” she says, and her voice carries the weight of fifteen years running a business, three kids raised solo, and an immunity to bullshit that would make a lie detector jealous. “And the third repair was also absolutely necessary.”
The third repair was creative maintenance. I can admit that internally. The oven didn’t actually break. I went by to check the seal on the door—which was fine—and while I was there, I might as well have replaced the gasket anyway. Preventive care. Totally reasonable.