Leo Ashford has treated the industrial soap dispenser like a bubble bath in a luxury hotel. He’s used approximately ten times the required amount. The result is not clean. The result is foam. Suds. A shimmering, expanding disaster.
A mountain of bubbles grows out of the sink like an alien life form, spilling over the steel edges, creeping across the tile floor like a slow, sudsy glacier. It advances toward my prep room with the implacable determination of capitalism itself.
He wrestles the first proofing box, large and unwieldy, into the water, but it’s impossibly slippery. He pushes it down, and a tidal wave of hot suds splashes up, soaking the entire front of his white jacket and plastering the hideous beige apron to his chest.
He scrubs. Hard. Too hard. The dried rye dough clings like concrete. His shoulder muscles strain, because of course he’s built like that, because the universe is cruel and likes symmetry.
The box shoots out of his hands, slick with soap, launching like a bar of soap in a prison movie. It clatters onto the tile and skids to a stop in a puddle of foam.
He’s sweating. Profusely. His expensive dark hair plastered to his forehead. A smudge of grey dough residue on his cheek. He stares at the bubbles like they personally betrayed him. He stares at the still dirty box. He stares at the nineteen boxes still waiting.
And then he sighs. Not dramatic. Not performative. Just defeated.
Gwen walks by with a tray of perfectly laminated dough. She stops. She takes in the bubble catastrophe, the dripping billionaire, the fact that he looks like he might actually cry.
A slow, delighted, merciless smirk spreads across her face. “You missed a spot,” she says, then disappears back into the kitchen, chuckling like she just got the gift of the century.
Leo grins, though I can tell he feels embarrassed at the same time. He reaches for the fallen box again, and then my shadow falls over him.
“Next time, use one-tenth of the soap you just used,” I say, my voice calm enough that it scares me.
Leo smiles and nods. I turn and walk back into the warmth and light of the kitchen. I stand at my table again, hands in dough, the clatter of pans and the heavenly smell of bread rising around me.
For a full minute, I listen to the faint sounds beyond the door: sloshing, the scrape of plastic, the soft agony of a man discovering that reality is not optimized for him.
And for reasons I do not have time to unpack at five in the morning, something twitches in my chest.
Not sympathy. Not yet.
I tell myself it’s just the novelty of watching a billionaire lose a fight to a plastic tub.
I tell myself that’s all.
And I go back to work.
Chapter 7
Leo
I stand in the puddle of my own incompetence for a full minute; mop handle clutched in white-knuckled grip. The smell of industrial bleach and warm, yeasty bread is disorienting. It’s like someone tried to manufacture comfort and punishment in the same lab and released the prototype into the world.
I have successfully orchestrated a hostile takeover of a $4 billion logistics company by reverse-engineering its satellite uplink.
And here I am, actively being defeated by a plastic tub and a bottle of soap.
And… I am not quitting.
I let out a long breath, loud in the suddenly quiet wash area. Tess and Gwen are back in the prep room, the thwack-thwack-thwack of Gwen’s rolling pin resuming its rhythmic, percussive beat.
“Ok, let’s do this,” I mutter.
I find the floor drain, push the mountain of suds toward it with the mop, and watch them gurgle away. I drain the sink, the water a disgusting, doughy-grey color. I refill it, this time using a single, precise pump of the green-bottled soap, and set about my task.
It is the worst kind of work. Mindless, yet punishing. The dried-on dough is fused to the plastic like cement. I soak, scrape with a stiff-bristled brush, scrub with a scouring pad, sanitize, rinse.
My hands, the hands Amelia forces me to get manicured, are not built for this. Ten minutes in, hot water and harsh chemicals turn them raw and angry red. The scouring pad is merciless.
One by one, the twenty boxes move from “dirty” to “clean,” stacked upside down just as she said. It takes nearly an hour. By the time I finish, the first faint grey light of dawn filters through the front windows, painting the bakery in soft blues and golds.
