Piper—who has more marketing sense than anyone I’ve ever met—put Jasper on the bakery’s Instagram and the post got more engagement than any of the food photos, which tells you everything you need to know about the internet. The post was captioned: Meet Jasper, owner of Sugar & Flour, keeper of the sunny spot, judge of croissant quality. It got shared to three different dog accounts. Jasper is now semi-famous. He does not care. He sleeps in his patch and lets the fame wash over him with the same indifference he shows to everything.
Morris still visits the bakery porch every morning. I leave him an apple. This is our arrangement—I provide fruit, he does not eat the railing. It’s an elegant system. It’s also consistently broken.
But Jace patched it both times without comment. He’d show up with wood and nails and the tools he has at his workshop, and he’d fix Morris’s damage like it was an expected maintenance schedule. Not annoyed. Just present. This is how we handle things now: Morris destroys, Jace rebuilds, I navigate between them like a diplomatic corps of one. Morris eats the apple. Jace eats whatever I baked that morning. I get to stand in my kitchen and watch both of them exist in my space.
He is no longer a nuisance. He is a neighbor. He is part of the rhythm. He is the reason Jace comes by with tools in his hand and a specific kind of intention in his eyes.
Piper runs the bakery’s social media. The “Morris Watch” posts got traction first, and now the account has a following that includes people from Tennessee who’ve never been to Alaska but are deeply invested in a moose who eats infrastructure.
Dotty comes in every morning at eight-thirty. You could set a watch by it. She drinks a black coffee—her own blend from thecafé, which she brings in a thermos because she refuses to drink mine, which is fair because my coffee tastes like regret and hot water compared to hers.
Then, at eight-forty exactly, she gets up. She brings her cup to the counter. And she says something devastating and affectionate before she leaves.
This week: “The brioche is better than last week. Carl must be in a good mood.”
Patrice and Trace bring Brooklyn by every weekend. The kid is running everywhere now—in that specific way that makes adults cringe every time she gets close to crashing into things, ready to come running if gravity suddenly decides to win an argument. We’re probably going to be friends as she grows.
Her favorite word was “cookie,” which I claim as a personal victory and which Trace disputes because he says it was actually “Jasper,” but it wasn’t. It was cookie. I was there. I heard it. I have Piper’s Instagram post to prove it—there’s a photo of Brooklyn sitting in her booster chair with what I can only assume is rapture on her face, holding a half-eaten butter cookie, her mouth forming the shape of the word. Trace was not there. Patrice was laughing too hard to be a reliable witness. So by the rules of evidence, cookie is the correct answer.
Tessa and Gage walk the trail on Sunday mornings with Rocco and Toby. The dogs visit Jasper at the bakery like it’s a scheduled playdate, which it is. They arrive with the precision of public transportation. Gage doesn’t own a watch that I’ve ever seen, and yet he always arrives at exactly the same time. “Time is a suggestion,” he once told me. “Unless it’s Sunday morning with Tessa.”
While the dogs run, Tessa and I drink coffee. Her good coffee. She brings it from her house because she knows mine is bad and she’s kind enough to say “I brought extra” instead of “yours is undrinkable.” We talk about nothing and everything.About the bakery and the weather and the way the mountains look different depending on the light. About what I’m baking and how Gage is doing and whether Jace has finally learned to smile like he means it.
She never told me to stay. She told me to make a decision. And then she showed up every Sunday after I made it, like checking to make sure the decision was holding. Like a friend checking a wall to see if the crack is spreading or if it’s stable.
It’s holding.
Birdie and I have reached a détente. It’s a détente that only exists between people who respect each other but are still too competitive to admit it directly.
She makes bread. I make pastry. We do not compete. We do not compare. We do not talk about the baking competition where she won and I got Morris’d into oblivion. We just exist in parallel, making different things, occasionally running into each other at the farmer’s market or at Dotty’s café.
But last month, she texted me: “Can you teach me lamination? I want to try Danish.”
And I said: “Can you teach me sourdough? I want to nail the rye.”
So we did. We met at her store on a Monday when both our shops were closed. She showed me her starter—which is older than I am, apparently, inherited from her grandmother—and I showed her the folding technique that makes croissants rise. We didn’t talk about competition. We didn’t talk about the fact that she’s better at bread and I’m better at pastry. We just worked in her kitchen, moving around each other, showing each other the specific grace of our separate expertise.
She made beautiful sourdough rye. I made beautiful Danish. Neither of us has acknowledged that we were helping each other, because the pride is still there, underneath, and that’s fine. Pride between bakers is just respect wearing a disguise. It’s just twopeople saying: I see what you’re good at. Let me show you what I know.
Marnie stocks my croissants at the general store now, displayed on a cherry shelf Jace built her in trade. This is what we do in Ashwood Falls—we trade wood for space, space for food, food for labor.
And Jax. Jax Moretti, who runs the bar and plays hockey, who laughs louder than anyone in town. He’s a person who walks into a room and immediately makes it better, not through anything he’s done but just through his presence. Through his loudness, his jokes, his refusal to let silence exist.
He shows up at every community event with a drink in his hand and a joke on his lips and the specific energy of a man who’s performing happiness so convincingly that most people don’t notice he’s deflecting. But Dotty notices. Dotty notices everything. She told me last week that Jax goes quiet when a certain name comes up—someone from his past, someone connected to the fishing lodge on the other side of the peninsula. She didn’t say who. She just raised her eyebrows in that Dotty way that suggests she knows something the universe hasn’t figured out yet, and said: “That one’s next.”
I knew what she meant. “Next” for the next fairy tail, presumably. “Next” in the continuing saga of Ashwood Falls romance. Jax is too alive not to be looking for something. He’s looking in the direction of someone who isn’t looking back yet.
This morning—this specific Saturday in October, with the line out the door and the first real cold settling over the mountains and the leaves on the birch trees going gold in that particular way that only happens once a year—I’m standing behind the counter at Sugar & Flour.
I’m wearing flannel and heels. Both. At the same time. The flannel because it’s thirty-eight degrees and I’ve learned that survival in Alaska requires appropriate outerwear. The heelsbecause I’m still me—still the pastry chef from Austin who owns a French rolling pin and believes that a woman can be both practical and impractical simultaneously. That you can choose to be warm and also choose to have a little attitude about it.
That you can stand in the middle of a difficult choice and be more than what the situation demands.
Jace comes in at ten. He doesn’t wait in line—not because he cuts, but because the line parts for him the way lines part for tall, quiet men who everyone knows built the furniture they’re sitting on. Built it with their hands. Put thought into it. Made it matter.
He walks to the counter. Jasper lifts his head from the sun patch and thumps his tail. Disloyal dog. This is Jasper’s morning greeting even though he sees Jace every morning. He acts like it’s a surprise every single time.
He looks at me across the display case—across the croissants and scones and the new rosemary-salmon pastry that I’m testing this week—and he doesn’t say anything.