‘You’re pulling a face,’ he observed as she banged the sugar jar a bit harder than necessary.
‘I’m not.’
‘You are.’ He watched her for a moment, lines around his eyes deepening. ‘You all right?’
She forced herself to relax her jaw. ‘Fine.’
The kettle clicked off. He poured tea and sat down opposite her, handing her a mug.
‘So,’ he said. ‘I’ve been looking at the rota for the summer. You know Jen’s leaving. So it’s just me in the back now.’
There it was. The angle of descent.
‘Right,’ she said carefully.
‘You’ve done brilliantly helping out up front.’
‘Thanks,’ Mae murmured.
‘And now it’s time to think about what comes next,’ he said. ‘And I thought you might like to go full-time now, as a baker.’
He smiled at her, warm and proud, as if he was offering her something wonderful. Mae’s stomach flipped, but not in the pleasant Callie-adjacent way.
‘Right,’ she said again, the word catching on her tongue. ‘Full-time baker.’
He chuckled. ‘I know you know a lot already, but you’d need proper training. Can’t take the place over without being a real baker.’
Head first, she thought. Straight back down to earth.
‘You’ll make this place even better when it’s yours.’
It wasn’t that she didn’t like the bakery. She just didn’t like that it was assumed. That the path ahead stretched out in one straight line from the ovens to the grave without room for any other version of her.
‘What about…’ she began, then faltered.
He looked up. ‘What about what?’
Other things, she wanted to say. Other lives. Other places. Days that didn’t start at four in the morning.
She knew how she wanted to say it. She’d thought of this moment many times. ‘I love this place, but I can’t live here forever. I’ll come back, obviously. But I have to make my own way. Not right away. But soon. Someday soon.’
But it was too big. She tried to make the words smaller, more manageable. ‘I just thought…’ Her fingers tightened on the mug. ‘Maybe I’d have a bit of time. After finishing school. To… work out what I want.’
‘You’ve been working it out since you could reach the counter,’ he said, laughing, as if she were being adorably silly.‘Not everyone gets this, you know. A place ready for them. You’re lucky, love.’
She knew. She did. People in the village told her all the time how lucky she was, how secure, how nice it must be to have something concrete. No hunting for jobs, no scary world.
She also knew that the word ‘lucky’ could feel like a hand on the back of your neck, gently but firmly steering you in one direction.
‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘I know.’
‘Besides,’ he added, softer, ‘I can’t do this forever.’ He glanced round the little kitchen, the ceiling with its slightly yellowed patch where the damp kept threatening. ‘And I always liked the idea of you being here, taking over. Keeping it in the family. Your mum would’ve loved that.’
There it was. The trump card. They’d started this place together, Mae’s mum and dad. So, for him, it was all tied in. Family and the business. That was what made this hard. She wanted to reject the bakery, but she didn’t want to reject him. And she didn’t know if it was possible to do one without the other.
‘You don’t have to worry about me taking over yet,’ Mae said with slight desperation. ‘You’re not old.’
He gave her a warm smile and took a sip of tea. ‘So. We’ll get you in the back from September, yeah? Ease you into it. By Christmas, you’ll be running circles round me.’
