He looked at the focaccia. Looked at her. Picked it up and took a bite.
His face did something she hadn’t seen before. Not a smile — his face didn’t seem to do smiles — but a softening around the eyes, a half-second where the consultant disappeared and someone else was standing there. Someone who knew what good bread tasted like and hadn’t expected to find it here.
“It’s very good bread,” he said.
“It’s the best bread you’ve ever had.”
“My face didn’t say that.”
“Your face said exactly that.”
He set the focaccia down on the napkin, picked up his legal pad, and headed for his car with his briefcase. At the doorway he paused.
“Good bread is hard to find.”
Anna stood at the counter and looked at the napkin with the half-eaten focaccia on it. He’d taken a bite. He’d eaten something she’d made with her own hands, and his face had changed, and she didn’t know what to do with any of that information so she put it in the same place she’d been putting everything about Michael Torres — somewhere at the back of her mind where it could sit until she was ready to look at it.
She pulled out her phone and called Meg.
“Hey. How’s the resort?”
“Chaotic. Margaret moved the presentation up again. What’s wrong?”
“Nothing’s wrong. The auditor finished his preliminary numbers.”
She heard Meg sit up straighter—it was audible somehow, even through the phone. Meg’s posture had a sound. “And?”
“Scholarship or salaries. Not both. We need thirty percent more revenue.”
Silence. “I’m coming up. I can be there by?—”
“Meg. I’ve got it.”
“Anna, this is the financials. This is my?—”
“I know it’s your thing. But it’s my job.” Anna looked at the hallway, where the typing had settled back into its steady rhythm. “He says the solution has to come from us. He can show us the math but we have to figure out the rest.”
“So let me help figure out the rest.”
“You will. At the family meeting. But right now, you have a presentation and a wedding and a resort full of people who need you. Let me sit with this.”
Another silence. Longer. Then Meg’s voice, quieter: “You’ll call me if?—”
“I’ll call you. I promise.”
Anna hung up, put the phone in her apron pocket, and stood in the empty Shack listening to the ocean and the grill cooling down. Thirty percent. The scholarship. Five hours of revenue and a man who’d eaten her focaccia and called it good bread.
She hung up her apron and turned off the lights.
CHAPTER SEVEN
The Schedule arrived on a Tuesday morning, hand-delivered by Eleanor Tanaka in a clear plastic sleeve with color-coded tabs.
Margo held it at arm’s length because her reading glasses were somewhere in the studio and she refused to go looking for them with an audience. The print was small. The tabs were five different colors. There was a legend at the bottom.
“We’ve been planning this for weeks,” Eleanor said, settling into Margo’s kitchen chair and helping herself to coffee the way she’d been doing for thirty years. “Vivian did the layout. Nadine did the scheduling. Letty contributed enthusiasm.”
“Letty contributed wine,” Margo said, still squinting at the page.
