chapter 6

Ellie's POV

"If you are going to stand outside my window at midnight, Mr. Cross, the least you could do is knock like a normal person," I said, arms crossed, still in my flour dusted apron.

I could not sleep. Nine days had turned into five, and every time I closed my eyes I saw Vanessa Cole's cold smile and heard her voice telling me things will go back to how they were always supposed to be. So at eleven at night I gave up, pulled on my apron, and went downstairs to knead dough I did not need to make, because my hands needed something to do besides shake.

That was when I saw him standing across the street, hands in his coat pockets, looking at the bakery like it was a museum he was not sure he was allowed inside.

I unlocked the door before I let myself think about it.

"You could have called," I said.

"I tried. You did not answer."

"I was busy avoiding my phone. Vanessa has that effect on people."

Something shifted in his face, quick and careful, like he was deciding how much to say. "She spoke to you."

"She warned me. There is a difference." I stepped back and let him in, the bell over the door ringing the same way it had rung for thirty years. "Sit down before you say something you regret."

He did not sit. He walked slowly around the small dining room instead, looking at the photographs on the wall, my grandfather's old apron hanging by the ovens, the chipped blue tile Rose refused to replace no matter how many contractors told her it was outdated.

"My grandmother used to bring me somewhere like this," he said finally. "Before she passed. I do not remember the name of it anymore. I remember the smell."

"Cinnamon and yeast," I said. "Every good bakery smells like that."

He almost smiled. Almost. "I came because I could not stop thinking about what Vanessa said to you, and I wanted you to hear it from me instead of her. She is wrong."

"Is she?"

"I do not know how to be the man my father wanted me to be and still keep every promise I make," he said, and his voice dropped lower, rougher, like the words cost him something to say out loud. "But I meant what I told you in my office. I keep my word. Whatever this becomes, Ellie, I will not let it become a lie you regret."

I did not know what to say to that, so I did what I always do when I do not know what to say. I put my hands back in the dough, kneading it harder than it needed, flour drifting up between my fingers like snow.

"You should be sketching," he said suddenly, nodding at the notebook I kept under the counter, the one Sophie was not supposed to know about, the one full of drawings for a bakery that did not exist yet, one with big windows and a reading nook in the corner and shelves for the books my grandmother never had time to read.

My whole body went still. "How do you know about that."

"Your grandmother mentioned it. Proudly, I might add." He picked up the notebook before I could stop him, and I watched his face while he turned the pages, waiting for the polite, distant expression powerful men wear when they are being kind to something small.

It never came.

"This is good," he said, and he meant it, I could hear that he meant it. "Why have you never built it."

"Because dreams do not pay rent, Nathan. Bakeries barely pay rent." The words came out sharper than I meant them to, four days of exhaustion finally cracking through.

He closed the notebook gently and set it down like it was something fragile. "After the wedding, the debt clears. The bakery is safe permanently, not just for the year. That was always the deal. What you build with it afterward is entirely yours."

"You make it sound simple."

"Nothing about this has been simple," he said, "except, strangely, this. Standing here. Talking to you without a boardroom or a camera in the room." He looked at me then, really looked, in a way that made the flour on my hands and the tiredness in my shoulders feel suddenly very far away. "I like this version of tonight."

"Careful, Mr. Cross. That almost sounded like honesty."

"Do not tell my lawyers."

I laughed before I could stop myself, a real laugh, the first one in days, and something in his face eased when he heard it, like he had been waiting the whole night just to cause that exact sound.

We sat down at the small corner table, the one with the wobbly leg my grandfather always meant to fix and never did, and he told me, slowly, about the letter his lawyers had found buried in his father's files, the one that started all of this, a debt of honor between two men who had died before either of us was born.

"Do you believe in that kind of thing?" I asked. "Promises that outlive the people who made them?"

"I did not, until a few weeks ago," he admitted. "I thought promises were only as good as the person keeping them, and people change, or disappear, or decide the cost is too high. But my grandfather kept his word to your grandfather for forty years without either of them speaking again. That has to mean something."

"Maybe it means the Hartmans and the Crosses are just stubborn."

"Maybe," he said, and this time the smile reached his eyes.

We talked until nearly one in the morning, about nothing important, about everything important, about the bakery and Lily and the strange, terrifying shape our lives were about to take. He told me about the first hotel his father ever built, a small, failing property in Queens that nobody believed in, and how his father had rebuilt it by hand rather than sell it. I told him about the summer my grandfather taught me to make croissants, folding butter into dough for six hours straight until my arms shook, because he said shortcuts always showed in the final product.

"You do not take shortcuts," he said. "I noticed that the first day, actually. In my office. You could have simply cried and begged. It would have been easier. You fought me instead."

"Fighting felt more honest."

"It usually is," he said quietly.

When he finally left, standing in the doorway with the bell still swinging behind him, he paused.

"Chase the dream, Ellie," he said quietly. "Whatever happens between us, do not let the fear win that one."

I stood in the empty bakery long after he was gone, staring at the notebook on the counter, my heart doing something complicated and unfamiliar and a little bit dangerous. I thought about Vanessa's warning, about the wedding now only five days away, about the way Nathan had looked at my sketches like they were something worth protecting instead of something to be humored.

Five days until the wedding, and for the first time, I was not entirely sure I was only marrying him for the bakery anymore, and that terrified me more than any headline ever could. I climbed the stairs to my apartment slowly, replaying every word, wondering if he had felt even half of what I had, or if I was simply a lonely woman reading too much into a kind man's midnight visit.