By 5:45, I had Nora settled on the couch in the living room with a blazing fire in the fireplace. She was already falling back to sleep before I even straightened up.
“Why don’t you just move in here?” Kane asked. “There’s plenty of room now that the others went back to Toronto.”
The ‘others’ are the rest of our siblings, Declan, Kat, and Connor, and their spouses.
We’d been over this conversation many a time, but the more that I thought about it, the more it sounded like a good idea. There would be no dragging Nora out in the wee hours of the morning in minus thirty-degree weather. But part of me didn’t want to give up my privacy. “I’ll think about it,” I said as I headed towards the door. “Gotta go,” I waved, closing it behind me.
A half hour later, the bakery came into view as I rounded the corner onto Main Street. A postage-stamp of a building wedged between a western-attire shop and a livestock-and-feed supply store, both of which did more business than we did, which was a lot.
The bell over the door sounded as frozen as I felt. Usually, I would be greeting Helen, who would already have the heat cranked up and the coffee on,but she was scheduled to have knee surgery at eight a.m. I looked at the clock on the wall and hoped that it would be a slow morning, at least until Frank, the owner, showed up at 9:00.
I went right over to the coffee machine and started a pot. Then, I checked the wall thermostat. It was balmy, 69 degrees. I bumped it up to 71 and headed into the kitchen to preheat the ovens. After hanging up my stuff in the staff washroom, I tied on an apron and looked at the bakery orders for the day. Three birthday cakes, plus one smash cake, three dozen cupcakes, and two orders of cheddar stuffed bread. All on top of the regular bakery items for sale. While the ovens heated up, I went out and made myself a cup of coffee.
The first customers were always the same: Mister Stein, who bought day-old baguettes for his pigs, and Fran Darling, who ran the historical society. She always wanted her scone “hot as a tire iron.” I liked Fran, mainly because she knew how to eat a scone properly.
With a sigh, I pushed away from the counter and headed to get the day’s baking started.
By the time I’d turned over the “OPEN” sign and started another pot of coffee, I’d had one tray left to put in the showcase.
The bell tinkled above the door as I headed to the kitchen to retrieve it. “Just a second, I’ll be right there,” I called over my shoulder.
I carried the tray of donuts out and placed them on the top shelf of the showcase. Expecting Mr. Stein, I plastered a smile on my face. “Good morning, Mr…. Ah.”
It was someone else. Tall, broad-shouldered, and unfamiliar, bundled in a pea coat that looked like he was in Toronto rather than Pinecrest, staring at the display counter with a forensic level of concentration. I looked at his hands. The right one was scratched and swollen at the knuckles, and his thumb had a crescent of dried blood under the nail, like he’d smashed it with a hammer. He saw me watching and gave a little half-smile I couldn’t quite place.
“Can I help you?” I asked with the same plastered smile on my face.
He hesitated, then nodded. “Yeah. I’ll take, uh… two of those,” he said, gesturing vaguely at the apple fritters, “and a black coffee. If that’s not too much trouble.”
“Save me from the day if it is,” I said, and he laughed—not a belly laugh, but the startled huff of someone not used to being answered sincerely. He had a crooked smile and the kind of eyebrows that suggested trouble sooner or later. But not for me, thank you very much.
I boxed up the fritters, poured the coffee, and slid the cup across. “Take off the lid when you’re ready to drink it,” I warned. “It’s broken, and you’ll spill iton yourself. I would give you another, but the whole shipment was like it.”
The man nodded, already fishing in his wallet with his left hand. “Heard you all got hit pretty bad last week. Snowstorm?”
“Three feet in under twenty-four hours,” I said. “Broke six roofs, shut down the highway. We’re still digging out.”
He smiled, almost sadly. “I read about that. Must be a tough winter for everyone.”
“Nothing we’re not used to.” I looked out the window at the dark clouds. “There’s a blizzard on its way.”
His eyes flickered up at me, bright and icy clear. “Does that happen often, a blizzard?”
I shrugged, found myself smiling back. “You have no idea.”
He tapped the glass, hesitated. “So, you’re the… owner?”
I shook my head and wiped my hands on my apron. “No, just the early shift. Frank Henderson owns the place.”
He looked amused. “Hard to imagine anyone needing a bakery open at—” he checked his phone “—8:10 AM.”
“You’d be surprised what secrets people are willing to share in exchange for a donut, Mr…?”
He hung back, then offered his hand. “Caleb. Just Caleb.”
His grip was warm and dry, but I saw the way he blinked at the contact, as though it reminded him that he was real.
For a while, we didn’t speak. He nursed his coffee at one of the tables, chewing with the slow, deliberate pace of someone who wasn’t there for the donuts at all. I stocked the scone trays, arranged the croissants into pleasing angles, and kept him in my periphery. He watched snowflakes dissolve against the front window, then watched me, then the snow again.
