Chapter Six: Pine Street

The shop took longer to open than I expected.

I had thought, in those first hopeful days, that scrubbing the floors and fixing the door would be the hard part. I was wrong. The hard part was money. Every board I needed to repair the counter cost more than I had budgeted. Every roll of cloth I wanted to stock ate further into the small pile of coins I had left from Millbrook and my mother's dress sold at the back of my mind as a thing I refused to do, no matter how thin my savings grew.

I worked the bakery in the mornings before the sun was fully up, my hands deep in flour, and spent every afternoon on Pine Street with sleeves rolled to my elbows. By evening I was too tired to do anything but fall onto the thin mattress above the bakery and sleep without dreaming, which I was grateful for. Dreams, in those weeks, only ever led back to a great hall and seven words I was trying very hard to forget.

The bird-shaped water stain on the ceiling never fully came out, no matter how many times I scrubbed at it. In the end I decided to leave it. It made the room feel less like a stranger's building and more like mine, flaws and all.

I met Daniel on a Tuesday, though I did not know his name yet, and I certainly did not know how much he would come to matter.

I was outside the shop, trying to fix the crooked sign I had painted myself, ROSE HAVEN in green letters that were not quite even, when the ladder I had borrowed from Agnes gave a sudden lurch beneath me. I grabbed for the doorframe and missed, and would have gone down hard onto the street if a pair of hands had not caught me first.

"That is one way to make an entrance," a voice said, amused.

I found myself steadied against a man I had never seen before, tall, well dressed in a way that did not belong to Millbrook, with the kind of easy smile that made you want to smile back even when you had just nearly broken your neck.

"Thank you," I said, straightening myself and my dignity at the same time. "I had it under control."

"Of course you did."

He picked up the sign, which had fallen to the ground, and looked at it with genuine interest rather than the polite dismissal I had braced for.

"Rose Haven," he read. "You are opening this?"

"Trying to."

"It has been empty a long time. I did not think anyone would take it on." He glanced through the grimy window at the half-finished shelves inside. "You are doing this alone?"

"I am doing it alone."

Something in the way I said it must have told him not to offer pity, because he did not. He only nodded, like that was a perfectly reasonable answer, and handed the sign back to me.

"Daniel Reyes," he said. "I buy and sell property around Millbrook and a few of the towns nearby. If you ever need advice on running a shop that does not go bankrupt in its first month, I have opinions."

"I did not ask for your opinions."

"No," he agreed, smiling. "But you will."

He was right, though it took me another two weeks of struggling with pricing and suppliers before I admitted it.

Rose Haven opened on a grey morning in early spring, with exactly six items on the shelves that I felt were good enough to sell and a hand painted sign that was still slightly crooked no matter how many times I straightened it.

Nobody came in for the first two hours.

I sat behind the counter, watching the empty street through the window, and let myself feel, just for a moment, the full weight of what I had done. I had left my pack, my family, the only life I had ever known, to sit in an empty shop in a town where nobody knew my name, waiting for customers who might never come.

Then the door opened, and an older woman stepped in asking about ribbon for her granddaughter's birthday, and I stopped thinking about anything except making my first sale.

By the end of that first day, I had sold four small things and earned barely enough to cover the cost of the flour I had bought that morning. It was not much.

It was also, somehow, the proudest I had felt in my entire life.

Daniel came by again a week later, this time with a crate of glass jars he said he had bought too many of for a project that fell through, and no real use for them.

"I do not need charity," I told him, arms crossed.

"It is not charity. It is a bad business decision on my part that you would be helping me fix by taking them off my hands." He set the crate on the counter. "You could sell preserves in these. Or those little dried flower arrangements I saw you making in the window yesterday."

I had not realized anyone had seen those.

"You watch my shop?"

"I watch most of Pine Street. It is a professional habit." He leaned against the counter, studying me the way he seemed to study everything, calculating and curious at once. "You are good at this, you know. Better than you probably think."

"You barely know me."

"I know enough. You fixed that door yourself. You painted that sign yourself, badly, but yourself. You have not asked anyone in this town for a single favor since you arrived, not even when I am fairly sure you needed one." He shrugged. "That tells me plenty."

I did not know what to say to that, so I said nothing, and busied myself unpacking the jars instead.

He did not push further. He simply helped me stack them onto the shelf, and when he left that evening, he told me he would be back the following week to see how the dried flowers sold.

He was, in his own way, becoming the first real friend I had made since leaving Silver Moon Pack.

I told myself that was all it was. Friendship. Nothing more.

I mostly believed it.