CHAPTER EIGHT

Megan's POV

I found the place by accident, three days into a life that was starting to feel less like mine with every passing hour.

It was a small community kitchen tucked between a laundromat and a flower shop, the kind of place that rented out counter space and ovens by the hour to anyone who needed them. I'd wandered in on a whim, restless after another silent dinner and another night alone in a bed too big for one person, aching for something that felt like it belonged to me instead of to the Carusso name.

Baking had always done that for me. Flour on my hands, something rising in an oven, the particular quiet of measuring and waiting — it was the one thing that still felt exactly the same as it had before any of this happened.

I was elbow-deep in dough when I noticed the woman at the station beside mine, humming quietly to herself over a tray of what looked like cinnamon rolls, flour dusted across one cheek like she hadn't noticed it was there.

She was already elbow-deep in her own tray by the time I arrived, flour scattered across the counter like she'd been at it a while. "You're doing that wrong, you know," she said without looking up, a smile in her voice.

I blinked. "Excuse me?"

She nodded toward my dough. "You're handling it too much. It'll go tough on you if you keep kneading it like you're mad at it." She glanced over, grinning. "Which, no judgment, some days I am too."

I laughed before I could stop myself — a real laugh, the first one that had come easily in what felt like weeks. "Fair enough. I'm Megan."

"Leah." She wiped her hand on her apron and held it out. "First time here?"

"Is it that obvious?"

"A little. You've got the look of someone who needed to hit something and dough was the safest option." She said it lightly, like a joke, but there was something warm underneath it too, an easy kind of understanding that didn't ask for an explanation.

I didn't offer one, and she didn't push, and somehow that made it easier to keep talking. We ended up sharing an oven when mine turned out to be running hot, trading stories while our respective batches baked — nothing real, nothing that touched on Arian or the contract or anything I couldn't say out loud, just easy, surface-level things. Her favorite films. My worst kitchen disasters. The kind of conversation that didn't ask anything of me except to be present in it.

"You should come back," Leah said, when we were finally packing up, both of us walking out with containers of things we'd made. "I'm here most weeks. It's nice having someone to actually talk to instead of just baking alone and judging myself in silence."

"I'd like that," I said, and meant it more than I expected to.

We exchanged numbers before we parted ways, and I walked back to the car the driver had waiting for me with something lighter in my chest than I'd felt in days. It wasn't much — an afternoon, a stranger, a shared oven — but it was mine, untouched by contracts or boards or a marriage that still didn't feel entirely real most days.

I hadn't realized how much I'd been missing exactly this — someone who didn't know me as Mrs. Carusso, who had no idea what my life actually looked like behind the mansion gates, who just saw a woman who kneaded her dough too aggressively and laughed a little too loud at her own jokes. For an afternoon, I hadn't had to perform anything for anyone. I'd almost forgotten what that felt like.

Leah texted that same evening, a photo of her cinnamon rolls with the caption told you the kneading thing was a whole science, and I found myself smiling at my phone in a way I hadn't in longer than I wanted to admit. It was such a small thing, a stranger's cinnamon rolls and a bad joke, but it was the first message all week that hadn't come from a maid confirming my schedule or Arian confirming an appearance.

We met again three days later, and then again the following week, until it became a quiet, easy rhythm — the one part of my new life that felt like it belonged entirely to me and not to anyone watching from the outside. Leah had a way of making everything feel lighter than it was, teasing me about my terrible pie crusts, telling ridiculous stories about her own disasters in the kitchen, filling the silence I hadn't realized I'd been carrying around since the wedding. She never asked too many questions about Arian, which I appreciated more than she probably knew, and I never offered more than the careful, edited version of my life that I gave everyone these days. It felt, for the first time in weeks, like I had a friend who wanted nothing from me at all.

It was during our fourth visit, both of us covered in flour and laughing about something that didn't matter, that she said something that should have caught my attention more than it did.

"Must be a lot," Leah said, out of nowhere, licking icing off her thumb, "learning to run a whole mansion like that. Especially with everyone waiting to see how you measure up." She paused, just slightly too long. "Especially once she's back."

I glanced up. "Once who's back?"

Something flickered across her face — there and gone so fast I almost convinced myself I'd imagined it. "Oh — nothing, sorry. I just meant, you know. In-laws. Family. That kind of pressure." She laughed it off, reaching for another tray like the moment had never happened. "Ignore me, I talk too much when I'm tired."

I let it go. It was such a small thing, an offhand comment in the middle of an otherwise perfect afternoon, gone from my mind by the time I'd finished icing my own tray. I had no reason yet to wonder how a woman I'd met at a bakery three weeks ago already knew there was a "she" worth being nervous about at all.