"You're definitely not order."
"I used to be. Before I came here. My life was entirely ordered. Scheduled, planned, predictable."
"And now?"
"Now I repair roofs with bleeding hands and hope a baker will forgive me for breaking her trust."
"That does sound chaotic."
"Also painful."
"The hands or the hope?"
"Both."
She finally released his hands, stepping back, but the distance felt less like rejection and more like necessary breathing room.
"I should make dinner," she said. "You should eat something before you go back to the inn."
"I should go!"
"You've been on my roof the whole day," she said at last, the words coming out gruff to disguise their softness. "The least I can do is feed you."
"Is this forgiveness?" Alaric asked, a half-smile that didn’t quite trust itself.
"This is soup," she replied, lifting her chin. "Do not read poetry where there is only supper."
Yet the corner of her mouth betrayed her; the almost-smile flickered and steadied, and something tight in his chest loosened— not absolution, not yet, but something like... a door no longer barred.
She ladled out a thick, golden broth that steamed in the cold air every time the back door gave a token shudder against the wind. She cut bread still warm from the afternoon bake and set out a wedge of cheese whose sharpness woke the tongue. It was nothing special but it was everything necessary. After hours on a winter roof with numb fingers and stubborn tiles, it tasted better than any twelve-course dinner he'd endured in London while practicing the art of polite emptiness.
They ate first in companionable quiet, the scrape of spoons and the small domestic sounds of a working kitchen, forming a kind of music.
"Your mother used to come here," Marianne said suddenly, as if the thought had tapped her shoulder and demanded to be let in. "To the bakery. When I was very young."
He set his spoon down. "She did?"
"Every Christmas season." Marianne’s gaze went past him, through the wall and into some warm December long ago. "She'd order half the wonders of the world; puddings that required an army of hands, cakes that needed their own weather, pastries so delicate I was afraid to breathe near them. But she’d sit right there," she tipped her chin toward the chair he occupied," and talk to my mother while they baked."
"What did they talk about?"
"Everything and nothing." A small smile. "How the geese were tyrants. Which hymn actually suited Mrs. Martin's voice. Whether the village ivy was prettier this year than last. My mother said the duchess was lonely and tried to hide it by being interested in absolutely everything. Sometimes she brought books and read to me while I murdered dough scraps with my wooden spoon."
"What kind of books?"
"Fairy tales, mostly. Princes who had to deserve their princesses. Girls who outwitted witches. She said in real life titles were paper crowns, pretty, but they dissolved in rain, and love had to be earned, by anyone who wanted it."
"She was probably thinking of my father," Alaric murmured.
"Was he truly so awful?"
"He wasn’t cruel," Alaric said, staring into his soup as if it might offer confession. "He was absent. You can fight cruelty. You cannot wrestle with emptiness."
"Like you were," she said, not unkindly.
"Yes." He let the word sit between them. "I became the sort of echo I despised."
"But you're here now," she said, and then added, as if to rescue him from pride, "only because I collided with you and a tray of mince pies."
