I clear my throat, then point to my lower stomach, on the right side.
“Did you take a blade to your stomach?” she asks with avid curiosity, like she’s trying to figure out how that’d work. That’s not an easy injury to pull off.
“Nope. This one’s courtesy of fate. Ruptured appendix when I was ten.”
She laughs, then smacks my shoulder. “And I thought you were showing me your hockey war wounds.”
I lift my right arm, showing her the underside, home to a long, jagged scratch. “Now that one’s from a blade.”
She reaches for it, slides her thumb down the scar like she’s tracing it, memorizing it maybe. Now it’s my turn to suck in a breath. I don’t really know how we went from her brother asking me to finance a bakery to exploring wounds and touching scars. But I also don’t entirely want it to stop.
She might though. A few seconds later, she straightens and says, “Let me finish up your back.”
Focusing on her nursing mission, she grabs supplies from the sink where she set them down, cleans my arm, then returns to my back. She rubs more peroxide onto the cat scratch there before reaching into her first-aid kit and pulling out a large bandage.
When she puts it on my back, I groan in protest. “You’re really doing that?”
“Did you want to mess up another shirt with your blood?”
“I don’t have another shirt with me. This seems to be a recurring theme in my life—the ruination of shirts when we’re together.”
She seems to give that some thought. “Hmm. That’s true. Maybe I need to keep some extra shirts around for you.”
“Yeah, you do that, Mabel.” I rise and toss the bloody one over my shoulder rather than pulling it back on. Why wear it when she seems to enjoy the shirtless view so much? I’m a nice guy after all. This is a nice thing to do.
She drops the supplies into her backpack, picks it up from the tiled floor, and heads to the door.
“All right. Are we doing this?” I ask as we leave the bathroom.
“You’re saying yes?” It comes out as a squeak.
“I mean, talking about the bakery.”
“Yes. Of course.” But she stops in the bathroom doorway, surveying the combo dressing room-slash-kitchen space in front of us, her brow knit. “I keep wondering why she bought this for me. At first, I thought it was a joke. But she wouldn’t buy this as a joke. There are so many family connections here—my great-grandmother working here, then my grandma taking photos for a calendar. But the connections stopped after that. My mom’s an academic—like her dad, in a way, since he was a teacher. I’m a baker. Theo’s a lawyer turned GM. But Grandma givesmea firehouse?”
She shrugs as she seems to search for an answer neither one of us has.
“I bet you wish you could ask her.”
“I do,” she says, soft and a little sad. “I really do.”
“There are things I wish I could ask my mom.”
“Right? That’s one of the hardest parts about losing someone. Not being able to ask those questions anymore.”
“Yeah. I always want to ask her about Charlotte. How to handle things.” I shake off that memory and try to focus on the present, on questions that have answers, maybe in this kitchen and that huge sink and all those cupboards. There might even be some answers in the dressing room. Who knows? “It’s yours now, though, and you know what you want it for.”
“Right. I do. Let’s talk about the bakery and check out the rest of the firehouse. Like the kitchen.” She sounds as if she’s about to explore a quaint alleyway in Paris with possible treasures around every corner.
“Lead the way through your inheritance,” I say, as we head past the mirrored dressing room toward the kitchen. Cabinets loom high above the appliances, so that’s a plus—lots of workspace and storage.
Mabel stops in front of one of the two industrial-sized ovens, running a hand across the top with a happy sigh. “I could see this as my bakery.” Then she quickly corrects herself. “Ours.”
But that’s the thing I don’t get. “Mabel, why do you want to start a bakery with me?”
She opens the oven and inspects it. “Why not?”
I laugh, but the sound is quickly snuffed out by…reality. “That hardly seems like a reason.”
