He looks up at me. There is a question in his face, not for praise, not for permission. He is not looking at me for approval. He is looking at the dough.
“What do you think?” he asks nervously.
“Your tension is sloppy,” I tell him. “Your seam is on the side, not the bottom. You are still using your hot palms too much.” I pause and tap the sad little boule. “But it is not a complete disaster.”
“How long did it take you to learn this?”
“Meemaw showed me when I was six. You will get there in about twenty years,” I joke.
I turn and walk toward the front door. My body feels like lead. My brain feels scraped out with a spoon.
“4:45 a.m. tomorrow,” I call over my shoulder. “Do not be late.”
Chapter 9
Leo
It is day four, and I arrive at exactly 4:44 a.m. I am a wreck.
My designer white uniform, the one Amelia sources from a Parisian couturier who apparently specializes in dressing clueless billionaires like chefs, is gone. I threw it in the penthouse incinerator without ceremony. It was a casualty of war, stained with egg yolk, industrial bleach, and my own profound humiliation.
I now wear what Amelia produces when I ask her for something real.
It is dark grey, ridiculously expensive Japanese selvedge denim work pants. A plain black T-shirt that costs more than Tess’s monthly electric bill. And a pair of high-design, luxury work boots engineered to look rugged, even though they will never actually encounter mud.
I look less like a baker and more like an actor playing a brooding artisanal craftsman in a perfume commercial.
But I am here. On time.
Tess is already at her steel table, clipboard in hand. She looks up when I enter. Her eyes scan my new, ridiculously stylish uniform. She does not comment. Her gaze flicks to my hands.
My hands are a catastrophe.
The broken nail on my left thumb is covered with a neon-blue SpongeBob Band-Aid I found in my penthouse’s ironic first-aid kit. The rest of my fingers are red, raw, blistered, chemical-burned by sanitizer and scrubbed by steel wool.
Tess sees them. I see her see them. I shove my hands into my pockets as if that fixes anything.
“Did you sleep well?” I ask foolishly, unable to find anything interesting to say.
“I guess,” Tess replies hesitantly. “What about you?”
For a second, my night flashes before my eyes. The shower I took to ease my back, the conversation with Amelia about my business partners being unhappy I canceled everything, the calls I ignored from Marissa.
“Yeah, my evening was quite relaxing,” I lie. “Ready to get back into things.”
“You’re on pre-shape,” she says. “Gwen left the first bulk ferment for you. Don’t tear the gluten. Don’t use your hot palms.”
“Yes, boss,” I mutter.
And so, my day begins.
I am a ghost who shapes. I am quarantined, set apart from the delicate, high-stakes ballet of croissant lamination and oven work. My entire world reduces to a twenty-pound tub of sticky, wet, eighty-percent hydration sourdough.
Pull. Scrape. Turn. Fold.
It is, I discover, a form of meditation.
A very, very frustrating form.
