Chapter One
Snowflakes and Cinnamon Rolls
In the quiet moments before Nora Cameron’s life took an irreversible turn, destiny stepped out of the shadows, and fate held its breath.
As the clock struck six in the evening, the sun had long ago dipped below the horizon, hidden behind the silhouette of the mountains—a familiar sight during early December in Vermont. Outside the bakery window, the snow fell gently, illuminated by the warm glow of the outdoor light above the bakery’s entrance.
Nora was putting the last batch of cinnamon rolls in the refrigerator for tomorrow morning when her phone buzzed, alerting her that it was time to close up shop and head home. Shetucked her phone back into her pocket and threw the dirty linens into a basket near the back door below a large framed photograph. Her mother and father stared back at her with big grand smiles, holding a gigantic wooden spoon with the words Belwether Bakery engraved into the wood. The spoon had been a gift from the chamber of commerce for being the oldest business in town.
Belwether Bakery had been in her mother’s family for four generations, and her parents planned to pass it on to Nora when they retired next year. It had weighed heavily on her thoughts for months now. Even though Nora loved baking, it wasn’t her passion like it was her mother’s. She didn’t want to take over the bakery; she wanted to follow her own dream, but she was unsure of just what that was. She thought that maybe going back for a master’s program in the fall would help her figure it out. However, if Nora didn’t take over the bakery, it would mean no retirement for her parents and, even worse, the eventual closure of a place that had been in her family for generations—her concerns had kept her in limbo for many years. She didn’t want to upset the balance, but she knew that she would never be happy if she stayed for the wrong reasons.
Moments like these made her wish she wasn’t an only child so the burden wouldn’t rest solely on her shoulders. Her guilt was why she had been avoiding the conversation with her parents for such a long time now. She knew she couldn’t continue stalling if she wanted to start college in the fall, so she needed to have the talk with them sooner rather than later.
She looked up at the old cuckoo clock, which looked like a little gingerbread house. Its jittery hands, shaped like dabs of white icing, read 6:41. Time to head home. She quickly wiped down the counters and checked to make sure all the ovens were off, then flipped off the old tin lights as she grabbed her jacket and headed out the back door of the small bakery.
Her Volvo station wagon was parked under one of only three streetlamps in town, and the light cascaded down onto it, illuminating the snow that was now steadily falling. The car was covered in a four-inch blanket of fluffy snow, and she used the sleeve of her jacket to brush it off, just enough to open the door. Popping her head into the car, she started it, then grabbed for her snow brush. However, it wasn’t in the backseat of the car where she always kept it.
“Crap,” she muttered under her breath. She must have left it in her parents’ car yesterday after she had cleaned it off for them. Resigning herself to the fact that she would be dusting off the entire car with her arm, she stretched her jacket sleeve over her hand and began the frigid job.
She had almost completed it when her phone rang in her pocket. She stopped, dusting the snow from her sleeves, and pulled her phone out. She looked down to see Eve’s name flash across the screen. Eve had been her closest friend since they were five years old, their bond unbreakable through the years. Nora figured that Eve was likely calling to catch up and arrange a dinner or lunch date, knowing they were overdue for some quality time together. And, of course, Nora suspected Eve was eager to share details about the new guy she had started dating a few weeks back.
“Hey, what’s up?” Nora said in a tired voice.
“You sound beat. You okay?” Eve asked.
“Yeah, just a long day, and I am out cleaning off the car. I think I might be frozen to my core now. Winter came on quick this year,” she said as she got into the car and warmed her hands in front of the heaters.
“You’re telling me. I got two crash claims just this morning.”
Eve worked for the local insurance company, and winter was always a busy time for them with car accidents and house fires.
“Hey, I was hoping we could get together tomorrow for lunch. Think you can break away for an hour?” Eve asked.
“Sure, as long as we can do it around one. I can’t leave during the lunch rush; Mom would kill me,” Nora told her as she watched the windshield wipers glide back and forth across the window, sliding the newly fallen snow as they went.
“Of course. I’ll see you tomorrow, Rae’s at one. Wait until I tell you about what Ryan and I did last weekend,” Eve said with a giddy little laugh before hanging up.
Nora smiled as she tossed her phone onto the seat next to her. I might consider myself psychic if it weren’t for Eve’s predictability, she thought. She sat there for a moment, watching the snow fall, attempting to thaw her fingers that had turned into popsicles in the chilly air. She pulled out of the small parking lot and headed north toward her apartment.
The roads were snow covered, and even with all-wheel drive, the car was slipping and sliding all over. The town crews hadn’t started their second round of plowing yet, and the roads were awful.
Nora’s heart pounded in her chest as she gripped the steering wheel, her knuckles white with tension, as she slowly crawled the nine miles to her place. When she finally pulled in, her neck was so tight that she could barely turn her head. She hated driving in snowy weather; it always caused her anxiety to flare and left her on edge. She would much rather walk or ride the bus; however, living in rural Vermont left both options out. She parked, shut off the engine, grabbed her phone and bag off the front seat, and made her way into her tiny apartment.
Nora rented the small space from her parents. It was a quaint, converted maple sugaring shack that sat at the bottom of her parents’ long winding driveway. They had transformed it into a tinyhouse for her grandmother to live in when she could no longer stay by herself but wanted to maintain her independence. Her grandmother had always been fiercely independent and had refused to be put in a nursing home. Nora shared a lot of things in common with her, but fierce independence was not one of them. Nora always seemed to be relying on others in some way or another. Her grandmother had struck out on her own in her twenties and volunteered to be a medic nurse in the Second World War. She had picked up and moved countries, and after the war was over, she continued to travel and explore the world, whereas Nora had barely made it out of New England.
Gram had passed away while Nora was away at college, and the burden of regret lingered with her to this day. She was supposed to come home for their monthly family dinner that weekend but opted to stay on campus instead and attend a party thrown by a guy she had a crush on. Her parents called the next day to tell her that Gram had died of a stroke the night before. They had been close, and even though Gram was nearing ninety years old, the news of her death came as a shock to Nora. She still couldn’t forgive herself for not coming home that weekend.
Two months after her gram’s death, Nora graduated and settled into the sugar shack as a pit stop before finding her own place. The decision was more than just practical; it was a way for her to reconnect with the memory of her grandmother, a way to feel close to her once again. That had been nearly five years ago now, a fact that sent a pang of anxiety through her, knotting her stomach.
The idea that she was still living off her parents at the age of twenty-nine made her feel less than confident about the trajectory of her life. All her other friends were married, starting families, or well on their way to established careers. Nora had seen thosethings come and pass her by, so close that she almost had that life once. However, those times were gone and now she had no man, no real home of her own, not even a career she had worked hard for and could be proud of. She might as well be a damn high schooler again. She didn’t even want to think about what her grandmother would say if she knew she hadn’t pushed forward to find her dreams and just fell in step with the plans her mother had laid out for her.
She trudged into her apartment, snow clinging to her, along with a heavy cloud of self-pity. Pushing aside a stack of books, she set her bag down on the table but then glanced back at the book on top, a new Barbara Davis novel she had just gotten. She wanted to dive into its pages, but she was beat, so she turned away and walked over to the fridge.
She pulled out half an apple pie and a container of whipped cream, then snatched a fork from the counter and headed to the couch to watch a little Hallmark channel. They had started their Christmas countdown before Halloween this year, and Nora had put off watching it in protest, until now. It wasn’t just the premature start of the Christmas season that bothered her, but also the idea of watching people fall in love. Love was not something she was particularly keen on these days. She had been in a serious relationship with a guy named Sam a few years back, but it had ended quite badly. So badly, in fact, that even after two years, she still had no interest in getting back into the dating world.
Pulling herself from the depressing line of thought, she decided that tonight the boycott on Hallmark would end as she flipped on a movie. She thought a little light-hearted Christmas rom-com was just the thing to dull her mind.
Pulling a fluffy fleece blanket off the couch, she wrapped it around herself and sat with the pie resting in her lap, adding avery generous amount of whipped cream to the top of it. Yup, that’s where her life was at the moment—Hallmark movies and pie straight out of the tin.
