Chapter 4

I had a rule about the bakery.

It was a simple rule, one I had maintained without difficulty for three years since Renee and I had opened the place: no personal drama inside these walls. The bakery was work, and work was clean, and clean meant that whatever was happening in the complicated interior landscape of my personal life stayed outside on the sidewalk where it belonged.

I was very committed to this rule.

Which was why, when the bell above the front door chimed at 9:15 on a Tuesday morning and I looked up from the croissant dough I was laminating and saw Marcus Calloway walk in, I experienced a brief, specific internal collapse that I immediately classified as a violation of my own policy.

He stood in the doorway for a moment, taking in the space — the glass cases, the warm light, the chalkboard menu Renee had rewritten last week in her precise, architectural handwriting. He was in a dark coat, the kind of Tuesday-morning put-together that suggested he had a meeting somewhere later and had stopped here first, and he looked around with the focused consideration of someone who was genuinely looking rather than just waiting for his eyes to find what they'd come for.

Then they found me, and he crossed to the counter.

"You didn't tell me it looked like this," he said.

I set down the dough scraper. "Like what?"

"Like something out of a movie." He was looking at the cases now, at the rows of pastries, the careful arrangement that Renee always said I over-thought and that I maintained was the difference between a bakery and an experience. "Jade described it but she left out the part where it's actually beautiful."

I was unreasonably affected by this and chose not to examine that.

"What can I get you?" I said.

He looked up. "What do you recommend?"

"Depends on what you want."

"Something I can't get anywhere else."

I held his gaze for a beat, then turned to the case and plated the cardamom brown butter tart that I had been making since year one, the one that had ended up in a food column eighteen months ago and tripled our foot traffic for six weeks. I set it on the counter with a coffee — black, no sugar, because I remembered — and watched him sit at the small table by the window without being directed there.

Renee materialised at my shoulder from the kitchen.

"Is that —"

"Yes."

"Why is he —"

"I don't know."

"Do you want me to —"

"Stay in the kitchen, Renee."

She retreated without further comment. I could feel her presence just beyond the doorway with the focused intensity of someone watching something through a gap in a fence.

The morning rush had thinned by nine, which meant the bakery was quiet enough that I could hear the specific quality of silence Marcus carried with him, the unhurried kind. He ate the tart slowly and drank the coffee and looked out the window at the Brooklyn street for a while before he looked back at me.

"Can you sit?" he asked.

"I'm working."

"For five minutes."

I looked at the kitchen door, where Renee was definitely listening, and then at the table, and then I untied my apron, folded it over the counter, and sat down across from him.

He looked at me in the direct, unhurried way he had — the quality of attention that had always done something disruptive to my composure — and said, "Isabelle liked you."

"I liked her too," I said, which was true.

"She told me on the way home that you were exactly what she'd pictured from Jade's descriptions." A slight pause. "She said you seemed like someone who knew exactly who they were."

I absorbed this. "That's a generous reading."

"She's a generous person."

"She is." I kept my voice even. "You chose well, Marcus."

He turned the coffee cup by its handle, a slow half-rotation. "She starts at the Manhattan office in three weeks. We've been looking at apartments in Tribeca." He said it plainly, not unkindly, like someone laying out information they felt you were owed. "I wanted you to know. Before Jade made it the subject of seventeen separate conversations."

"I appreciate the warning."

Something shifted at the corner of his mouth. Not quite the smile, just the suggestion of it. "You haven't changed."

"Six years is barely anything."

"I know." He looked at me steadily. "And somehow it feels like nothing and everything at the same time."

I was quiet for a moment, watching a cab move past the window outside.

"How does it feel?" I asked. "Being back."

"Strange." He considered it honestly, the way he considered most things — without rushing to a comfortable answer. "Like putting on a coat you left behind and finding it still fits but you've gotten used to not wearing it."

"Good strange or bad strange?"

"Both, depending on the hour."

I nodded. Outside, two women stopped to look at our window display — Renee's work, a fall arrangement involving small pumpkins I had objected to on principle and now privately loved.

"Can I ask you something?" I said.

"You can try."

"Did you know, when you left — did you know you weren't coming back for that long?"

He was quiet for a moment. Long enough that I thought he might deflect. Then: "I knew I was staying longer than I'd said. The work was there and the reasons to come back felt —" He stopped. Started again. "It felt easier to stay."

"Easier," I repeated.

He looked at me directly. "Some things were easier to be far from."

The bakery was very quiet. The coffee machine behind the counter made a faint settling sound.

I did not ask him what things. I understood, with the full clarity of someone who had spent four years being extremely honest with herself, that asking that question would open a door that I was not yet certain I wanted to walk through.

Instead I stood, retied my apron, and picked up his empty plate.

"Come back Thursday," I said. "I'm trying a new brown butter pecan tart. I need an honest opinion."

He looked up at me from the table. In the morning light, with his coat and his steady grey eyes and the particular way he had of making a small table in a Brooklyn bakery feel like the only place worth being, he was more than I knew what to do with.

"Thursday," he said.

Not a question. Not quite a confirmation. Something in between, which was, I was beginning to understand, the exact territory Marcus Calloway and I had always occupied.

I went back behind the counter.

Renee was waiting with both eyebrows raised and the expression of someone with a great deal to say and the wisdom to time it correctly.

"Not a word," I said.

She pressed her lips together.

He left ten minutes later. At the door he paused, turned back briefly, and looked at me across the length of the bakery with an expression I didn't have a name for yet.

Then he was gone, and the bell above the door settled, and the bakery went on being warm and ordinary around me.

I stood behind my counter and thought about some things were easier to be far from and what, precisely, he had meant by that.

And whether it meant what I wanted it to mean.

And whether wanting it to mean that made me a good person or a terrible one.

The answer, I suspected, was somewhere in the complicated middle — which was, I was beginning to think, where this entire story was going to live.