“Good.” She turns her back on me, final as a sentence. “Gwen, laminate. I’ll handle the ovens.”
Then, without even looking at me, she adds, “He is on pre-shape. Indefinitely.”
Gwen glances at me, an expression I can’t quite read, before turning back to her work.
The rest of the week is torture.
The social media post becomes a phenomenon, exactly as Julian predicted. Gold. Irresistible. The story is too clean, too meme-ready, too perfectly shaped for the internet’s appetite. A cold, beautiful, hyper-competent baker and her giant, adoring, himbo billionaire intern.
The forty-five-second clip of her teaching me to pipe a star is a viral atom bomb.
Sunrise & Salt is slammed.
But it isn’t the good kind of busy. It isn’t the regulars, the Mr. Hendersons who come for coffee and a morning bun and quiet familiarity. Those people get scared off by the line that now, by eight a.m., snakes out the door and around the corner like a living thing.
The new customers are a nightmare.
They are tourists. They arrive in packs, phones already raised, filming everything. They don’t come for the bread; the bread Tess and Gwen are killing themselves to produce. They come for the story.
“Is he here?” someone asks on the second day after the video, voice loud, camera panning. “Is the billionaire here?”
“Where’s the hot guy? The one from the video,” another person chirps, already smiling at their own screen.
One influencer-type, glossy lips, massive sunglasses indoors, leaning on the counter, says, “Can I get his number?” She pouts when Tess just stares at her blankly.
“He wouldn’t date you, would he?”
Tess, true to her word, is a general. She is polite. She is cold. She is efficient.
“We have classic, chocolate, or pistachio-cardamom croissants today,” she says, voice monotone.“No phone numbers.”
She runs on fumes. She and Gwen start coming in at 3:45 a.m. just to try to meet the new, absurd demand. They sell out of everything by ten a.m. Then the new crowd, denied a selfie with me, denied a sparkly croissant, denied the fantasy they came to consume, leaves one-star Yelp reviews like little acts of revenge.
Rude owner. The guy isn’t there. Not worth the hype.
Sold out of everything by 9? Poorly managed.
I saw the boss lady yell! She’s actually really mean IRL. #NotMyBaker
I see Tess read them once, her jaw tight, eyes flicking across the screen like she’s bracing for impact. Her spreadsheet-fueled anxiety goes into overdrive. Revenue is up, yes, but she is miserable. She runs herself into the ground serving a clientele that hates her, all because of a video she never asked for.
This is her fear of scaling, made manifest. This is exactly what she’s afraid of: losing the soul of her bakery.
And me… I am in my isolation cell. I honor my word. I am a ghost.
I arrive at 4:44 a.m., in my black T-shirt and expensive jeans, now permanently dusted with a ghostly white film of flour. I go straight to the back prep area. I do not speak. I do not make eye contact. I just… work.
I put all my frustration, all my shame at what I unleash, all my boiling-hot anger at myself, into the dough.
My world is an eighty-percent hydration starter. It is twenty-pound tubs of Auntie June, which I now have to feed and maintain myself. I learn her moods the way you learn weather. The smell when she’s hungry. The way she rises when she’s happy. The subtle sour note that means I’m late.
It is the thwack of my bench scraper. It is the burn in my shoulders. It is the pull. The scrape. The turn. The fold.
At first, I am angry, and my dough shows it.
I tear the gluten. I manhandle it. I fight it like it’s an opponent I can dominate through force.
Tess walks by, slaps my messy, torn dough ball with the flat of her fingers as if testing fruit for ripeness, and says, “Again. You’re fighting it.”
