I grab the next. Crack. Perfect. Two. I am good at this. This is easy. This is just a repetitive, physical-motion task. I can optimize… Three. Four. Five.
I start going faster, finding a rhythm. Crack. Split. Drop. Toss the shell. Gwen rushes past with trays of baguettes.
“Some friendly advice: don’t get cocky,” she mutters.
Crack. Split. Drop. Toss. I am on egg twenty-eight. Almost there. I am a champion egg-cracker, a man of the people, an intern with a future.
Tess is at the station next to me, back turned, weighing out ten-kilo batches of flour into massive bowls for the next day’s bread production. She is focused. Movements economical. She looks like someone who could do this in her sleep and still hit the exact gram.
I pick up egg twenty-nine. I go for the crack. I am going too fast, giddy with my own success. I hit it too hard. It doesn’t just crack. It explodes.
A spray of yolk and white shoots across the pristine steel counter. But that isn’t the worst part. The shell doesn’t simply fall into my bowl of twenty-eight perfect eggs. It shatters into tiny, shrapnel-like fragments directly into Tess’s ten-kilo, pre-weighed, bone-dry bowl of King Arthur High-Gluten flour.
A stunned silence drops over the prep station. Gwen, passing by, freezes.
I stare at the yolk dripping down the side of Tess’s flour bowl. I stare at the tiny specks of shell peppering the clean white flour.
Tess very, very slowly sets down her flour scoop.
“No,” she whispers. “That’s twenty-two pounds of flour. That’s… that’s the entire hearth loaf batch for tomorrow.”
“I… I can sift it?” I offer, my voice squeaking.
“Sift egg yolk?” she repeats. “It’s contaminated. It’s ruined.”
She stops herself, pressing the heels of her hands into her eyes as if she could physically push back a migraine.
Then she drops her hands and looks at me, disappointment heavy in her brown eyes.
“Could you step aside, please?” she asks softly.
She grabs the contaminated bowl, twenty-two pounds, a weight I would struggle with, and slams it into the dish pit.
“Gwen, reweigh the hearth batch. I’ll deal with this.”
Chapter 8
Tess
I’m about to tell Leo what to do next when the shop goes into panic mode.
“Boss, the croissants,” Gwen says tightly, pointing to the main oven. A tiny high-pitched ding-ding-ding timer has started. “They’re at eighteen minutes.”
“Shit!” I yell, loud enough to startle even myself.
My eyes whip wildly from the oven, the timer screaming its high-pitched warning, to the ruined flour, to Leo standing there in his soaked, sudsy, designer-white misery. I am trapped the way nightmares trap you: every option is wrong, and the clock is still ticking.
I have to fix his mistake. His multi-hundred-dollar, kitchen-contaminating, flour-ruining mistake.
But my highest-margin product is about to burn while my hands are covered in flour.
I make a split-second decision. It is desperate, ugly, and necessary.
“Leo!”
He flinches like I slapped him.
“You! The oven. Now. There are two black oven mitts on the hook. Get them. Open the main oven. Top rack. It’s a tray of croissants. Pull it out. Now.”
