I am begging.
“Tess… if you’re watching. I know I have no right. I know you hate me. I’m asking for ten minutes. No leverage. No money. No surprises. Just ten minutes to listen.”
Tears spill over. I don’t wipe them away.
“I am so, so sorry.”
I end the stream. The screen goes dark. For a moment, no one speaks.
Then Julian exhales slowly. “Well,” he says. “That was nuclear.”
Zane lowers the camera. “Chat’s… shocked,” he says, “Which is better than hostile.”
I stare at the blank phone screen.
“I didn’t fix it,” I say quietly.
Julian steps forward and puts a hand on my shoulder. Heavy. Steady.
“No,” he agrees. “But you stopped running.”
And for the first time since I walked out of the bakery, that feels like something I might be able to live with.
Chapter 23
Tess
I don’t reply.
I set the phone face down on the counter, like it might burn me if I look at it too long. Like it might start vibrating again, demanding something from me. My hands are steady. That surprises me. Everything inside my chest feels bruised and raw, like someone pressed their thumb hard into a fresh bruise and didn’t let go, but my hands are steady.
That’s how I know I’m not ok yet.
When I’m ok, I shake.
The bakery is dark. Closed. The blinds are pulled down, uneven at the corners where the cords have always been temperamental. The ovens are cold, their digital displays blacked out. The big mixer sits silent in the corner like a sleeping animal. It smells wrong in here, stale, like the air hasn’t moved since he walked out. Like the room itself is holding its breath, waiting to see what I’ll do next.
Sunrise & Salt has always breathed with me. It wakes when I wake. It exhales when I finally sit down. Tonight, it feels suspended. Paused mid beat.
I hear Gwen breathing beside me. Slow. Measured. She’s leaning back against the prep table with her arms crossed, eyes on nothing in particular. She hasn’t touched her phone once since the stream ended. She’s waiting and giving me space. Gwen is good at that. Always has been. She knows when to step in and when to plant herself nearby like a guardrail, letting me crash if I need to.
“He really did it,” she says quietly. Not hopeful. Not triumphant. Just stunned. “He burned it.”
I nod once. I don’t trust my voice yet. If I open my mouth too soon, something sharp might come out. Or worse, something soft.
I watched him cry.
I watched him say my words back to the world, stumbling over them like they were heavier in his mouth than they ever were in mine.
I watched him light the paper on fire.
It doesn’t erase anything.
The betrayal doesn’t rewind. The signature doesn’t disappear. The way my stomach dropped when I saw Sunrise & Soul glowing on that tablet doesn’t magically undo itself because he finally understood what he did.
But it does something.
The rage I was holding onto, the clean, sharp kind that made everything simple, doesn’t feel as solid anymore. Anger is useful. Anger is clean. It gives you edges. It gives you a direction to walk in. It lets you say no without flinching.
