“What did you say?”
I look at her. Let the silence hold for one beat—not a wall, just a pause, the kind that means the next words matter.
“I said yes.”
She blinks. “Yes to what?”
“She asked if I was going to fix it. I said yes.”
Gabby’s face goes through approximately seven expressions in three seconds—surprise, disbelief, tenderness, annoyance,amusement, something that might be outrage, and then a kind of radiant, helpless joy that makes her look exactly like the photograph of Edna on the wall. Not the features. The expression. The way of standing in a kitchen like it’s the center of the world because, for her, it is.
“One word,” she says. “You communicated the most important decision of our relationship in one word, via text, to Piper Lockwood.”
“It was efficient.”
She laughs. It’s the real laugh, the full one, the one that makes her whole face change and makes me aware of my hands and my heart and the fact that I would catch salmon every morning for the rest of my life if it meant hearing that sound.
I pull her back. She comes. Jasper’s tail thumps. Morris chews the railing. Somewhere, Dotty’s making coffee and announcing it to the whole town.
Three of them.
They were the right ones.
Epilogue - Gabby
Three months later, Sugar & Flour has a line out the door on Saturday mornings.
This is still surreal. That’s the only word for it—surreal in the specific way that getting what you wanted feels surreal when you spent most of your life expecting disappointment. There are people standing outside my bakery in October, in Ashwood Falls, Alaska, in thirty-eight-degree weather, waiting for salmon croissants.
Salmon croissants. The thing that started as a desperate accident on a morning when the oven tried to kill me and I had nothing but leftover fish and panic is now on the permanent menu. Item number one. Most popular order. Reviewed on three different food blogs by people who drove from Anchorage specifically to try them.
The review that made me cry—the good kind of crying, the kind where you laugh at the same time because your body can’t decide which emotion wins—said: “The salmon croissant at Sugar & Flour is what happens when a pastry chef from Austin meets Alaska and decides to stop fighting it.”
I printed that review. It’s taped to the register, right below the hand-lettered sign that reads THE MUTE AND THEMOTORMOUTH, which Dotty said once and I framed because some things are too perfect to let go.
The oven—Carl—has good days and bad days. Good days, he heats evenly and holds temperature and behaves like a reasonable piece of kitchen equipment. Bad days, he burns the left side of everything and makes a ticking sound that I’ve started interpreting as passive aggression. I talk to him either way. “Good morning, Carl. We’re doing croissants today, Carl. If you burn the brioche again I’m replacing you with something from this century, Carl.”
He burned the brioche last Tuesday. I did not replace him. We have an understanding.
Jace’s furniture fills the bakery now. The baker’s bench—the one he built for me, the one with the hidden drawer that still makes my throat tight when I open it—sits against the wall by the window. Inside the drawer is a note. I’ve read it maybe thirty times. It says:
For the woman who taught me that silence isn’t always the loudest thing in a room.
No signature. Just his handwriting, careful and precise, the way he does everything.
The tables are his: solid cherry, clean lines, craftsmanship that makes people run their hands across the surface before they sit down. People do this without being asked—they come in for a croissant and they stay for five minutes just running their palms across the wood grain like it’s something alive. I’ve watched strangers fall in love with his work. I understand completely.
The chairs are his. The display shelf is his. Every piece of wood in this building was touched by his hands. Some of them have imperfections—little marks that he could have sanded outbut didn’t. Blemishes. Character. Evidence of how they were made. When I asked him about it once, he said: “Perfect is boring. Real is better.”
I’m learning that’s true about people too. About relationships. About the messy, imperfect way that two people can fit together if they’re willing to show each other the grain.
Every piece of wood in this building is his, and sometimes when the morning light hits the grain just right, I stand there and look at it and think about how this man’s love language is furniture and fish and patience and I am the luckiest woman in Alaska.
We live between the two properties—his workshop, my kitchen—connected by the trail that once felt like too much distance and now feels like just enough. Four hundred yards. Close enough to hear each other if we shout. Far enough that I can stress-bake at midnight without him telling me to go to sleep. It’s the perfect architecture for two people who need space the way they need air—not to get away from each other but to come back fully.
Jasper has claimed a specific spot in the bakery. It’s the sun patch by the front window, between the display case and the door, which means every customer who walks in has to step over a seventy-pound Malamute who refuses to acknowledge that he’s in the way. He’s claimed this spot like it’s the most important real estate in Ashwood Falls, and he might be right. On clear mornings, the sun pours through that window and catches the dust in the air, and Jasper lies there like he’s been placed there specifically to illustrate what contentment looks like.
Nobody asks him to move. He is a fixture. He is a landmark. He is the reason people come back, I think. Not even for the croissants. Just to see if Jasper is in his spot. Tourists take photos of him. They tag him. They tell their friends back home:“There’s a moose that eats infrastructure in Alaska, and a dog that has better real estate in a bakery than I do in my own house.”