“Tess, your margins on the croissants are too thin. Use cheaper butter-blend. Use pre-made frozen dough.” Her voice sharpens. “Tess, Auntie June is too volatile. Use commercial yeast. Faster. Consistent.” She swallows, and the next one lands like a punch. “Why are you paying Gwen twenty-five an hour when a machine could laminate for five?”
She stops, breathing hard, staring at the offensive bright logo as if it personally insulted her grandmother.
“They don’t get it,” she whispers, and her voice breaks. “They don’t get Auntie June. They don’t get the smell. They don’t understand that the work is the point.” Her eyes shine, bright and angry. “They just see a brand to dilute. A bakery experience to franchise.”
She turns to me, and I feel like the streetlight is illuminating something sacred and furious in her.
“This place,” she says, voice shaking, “is all I have. It was my Meemaw’s dream. She taught me to bake in her tiny, hot kitchen in Pilsen. She’s in that starter.” Her finger jabs the air, aimed straight at my world. “And all these sharks. They just want to gut her. They want to gut me. They want to turn me into… into that.”
She points at the chain café, but I know she is pointing at my world. Brand building. Scaling. Squeezing margins until there's no flavor left.
“I’m not afraid of work, Leo,” she says. “I’m terrified of becoming that.”
We stand there on the sidewalk, two people from different planets staring at the same sterile, brightly lit hell.
And I see it clearly.
My prison is loneliness. An abundance of artifice. A lack of soul.
Her prison is fear. Terror that her soul will be stolen and repackaged into something hollow.
Two sides of the same desperate coin.
“I… I get it,” I say, my voice rough. “I wouldn’t let them touch her either.” My throat tightens. “Auntie June.”
I swallow.
“Or… or you.”
Chapter 14
Tess
I look at him, startled, like I forgot he was there. Like I just confessed my most guarded secret to a stranger on a sidewalk, and I am only now remembering that I have a mouth and I used it.
I laid my soul bare.
And he does not try to fix it. He does not offer to buy it. He does not do that billionaire thing where the solution is always a number with a lot of zeros.
He just listens.
Something in my chest goes tight and hot with the embarrassment of being seen.
I look away, flustered, my vulnerability turning my skin inside out. “I… I’m…” I gesture vaguely, as if motion can undo what I said. “This is my corner. I have to…”
I am so wrapped up in my confession, so flayed open by my own honesty, that I stop paying attention to where my feet are going.
I am at the curb. At the crosswalk. The DON’T WALK hand is a solid, glowing red.
And I step off the curb.
“Tess!”
The shout slices through the dusk.
A dark blue sedan barrels toward me, too fast, too quiet, headlights off like the driver wants to be a ghost. Then the horn blares, a furious honk that slams into my chest.
My body freezes in the street, like it has forgotten how to be a body.
