I am. I am fighting everything.
But after a few days, the anger burns off, leaving only quiet, simmering determination. The kind that doesn’t need to be seen. The kind that just… keeps going.
I stop fighting. I start listening. I learn to feel the dough’s life, its subtle push-back. I feel the moment the tension is just right, when the surface is no longer sticky but smooth and taut, like the skin of a drum.
And my hands begin to change.
The blisters heal, replaced by calluses on my palms and at the joints of my fingers. The skin toughens. My nails, which Amelia once paid someone two hundred dollars a week to buff, are now permanently caked with dried sourdough starter.
They are ugly. They are useful.
They are, I realize with a strange, sober satisfaction, baker’s hands.
Chapter 12
Tess
I watch him.
I’m stressed. Furious at the world. Sleep-deprived in a way that makes time feel like it’s folding in on itself. And yet I watch him.
I storm back from the front counter, fresh off an encounter with a TikToker demanding a free pastry for exposure, as if my landlord accepts exposure as legal tender. My face is a mask of thunder. My jaw hurts from clenching. My shoulders hurt from existing. I stalk toward the back, ready to find fault, prepared to yell at him, the author of my misery.
And then I just stop.
And watch.
He is in his corner, back to the chaos of the shop, his ridiculously expensive black T-shirt stretched taut across broad shoulders. He is working. Not on his phone. Not complaining. Not doing that helpless-rich-man stare, waiting for someone else to solve his incompetence.
He is shaping dough.
Pull. Scrape. Turn. Fold.
And the infuriating thing is that his movements are no longer clumsy. Not oafish. They are economical. Smooth. He has rhythm. The bench scraper becomes an extension of his hand, just as I taught him, and the fact that he listens makes something inside me itch.
He lifts a twenty-pound tub of dough, twenty pounds of eighty-percent hydration, living, sticky chaos, with an easy, practiced motion. On the first day, that same tub would have made him stagger like a newborn deer. Now he hefts it, shifts it, sets it down like it is part of him.
He divides it. His cuts are clean. He shapes. It is competence. Almost attractive competence.
I hate incompetence. I am allergic to it. I hate clumsiness and inefficiency, and the way they make my life harder because I do not have time. I do not have the emotional budget to drag grown adults across the finish line of basic functioning.
“Are you having fun?” Gwen suddenly appears behind me. I turn and see the grin on her face.
“I was just making sure he is not messing things up,” I lie.
Gwen nods and heads back to the oven.
For the past week, I have watched this business-minded billionaire transform, through sheer stubborn repetition, into a competent worker. Not a baker, not yet, but a worker. Someone who shows up, does the task, and does not whine.
And I find myself watching his hands.
The way he handles the dough is gentle yet firm and confident. The way his fingers curl and release. The subtle push and pull that turns a sticky surface into taut perfection in a few controlled movements.
I find myself watching his forearms, always coated in flour, muscles flexing with the rhythmic pull and fold.
I find myself watching the line of his back, the way he hunches in absolute concentration, brow furrowed, tongue stuck out just a little at the corner of his mouth, like an overgrown child doing math homework.
Completely unaware he is being watched.
