Page 4 of The Sugar and Spice Bookshop Bakery

It’s terrible timing – Mrs Danes leaving, Elizabeth failing to find a suitable replacement for her so deciding to retire, and at around the same time, things unravelling for Louise at Austen and Green. She tries to recall what she’d said during that phone call with her mother. Had she inadvertently given some indication that she would take over the bakery? Or has her mother jumped to the wrong conclusion and assumed that the bakery is the reason why Louise has come home?

Either way, Elizabeth will be disappointed. How on earth is Louise going to tell her?

Sleep eludes her. She rummages in her bags – she hasn’t bothered unpacking yet – pulling out her old dressing gown and wrapping it tightly around her. Then she goes into the lounge and slumps on the sofa. There’s a burnt orange throw folded on one arm, and she pulls it over her. It’s soft. Cashmere probably.

The coffee table is laden with a stack of paperbacks. Even after years of working in publishing, Louise never tires of the sensation of holding a proper, physical book in her hands or the scent of freshly printed pages. She’s read most of them already – she always reads the most important releases in the genres she edits – but nevertheless wells up at her mother’s thoughtfulness.

The beautifully decorated flat, transformed from what was once a cold storeroom, and the selection of books are Elizabeth’s way of welcoming her daughter home, and now Louise has to tell her that it’s just temporary, that she’s only here to sort her head out and figure what she wants to do with the rest of her life, and that nothing has changed – she’s never wanted to run the family bakery.

Louise’s stomach feels like there’s a cold, hard stone in it.

Restless, she pushes the cashmere throw aside and paces over to the back window. It’s dark outside, the kind of deep dark you never get in London, not even in the middle of the night. She knows the disused garden at the back of the bakery stretches down to the river, but she can’t see it in the blackness. She used to play in that garden as a child whilst her grandmother and her mother toiled in the bakery kitchen, producing the fluffiest scones and the lightest sponges for the residents of Applethwaite.

‘The most loyal customers in the whole of Yorkshire,’ her grandmother used to say.

Louise would be disappointing them too.

She turns away from the window and before she has time to really think about what she’s doing, she picks up the bunch of keys that her mother had pressed into her hand earlier and is opening the front door of the flat. She creeps downstairs, mindful that her mother is sleeping in the house next door, and unlocks the outside door, stepping into the cold night air.

She’s no idea what time it is. The streetlights are few and far between, and two of them don’t appear to be working. Louise looks down the high street towards the village green and the Red Lion pub, now in darkness. It’s after closing time then. Around midnight perhaps.

It’s barely three steps from the stairs that lead up to the flat to the entrance of the bakery. The first key she tries fits, and the door swings open.

Once inside, Louise gropes for the light switch, then winces as the lights come on, blinking as her eyes get accustomed to the sudden brightness.

The place feels strange. Wrong, somehow. And then she realises why. Ever since she can remember, this place has smelled of butter, vanilla and warm yeast rising. Now the air tastes faintly stale, as if the building itself has been holding its breath.

There are more tables and chairs here than Louise remembered. Her mother has changed the layout, squeezing in extras. Each one still has a small china bowl and vase, and Louise reaches for one of the bowls, half expecting to find a few crusty sugar lumps sitting inside.

The glass display cabinet lies forlorn and empty. When she was a child, there would have been row upon row of her grandmother’s delicious bakes. Eclairs oozing with cream and topped with real chocolate. Tiffin and lemon drizzle and Bakewell tart. And, of course, the ginger cake. Her grandmother’s ginger cake was famous throughout Yorkshire.

She weaves her way through the tables and chairs and into the back of the bakery, where she flicks on the lights. The stainless-steel worktops of the commercial kitchen are sparkling, and there is a brand-new food mixer. It’s the latest model, still in its box with the instruction manual sitting beside it, and alongside that, bags of flour and sugar, a large box of eggs, and a little jar of ground ginger.

Her throat tightens. Her mother knew she’d come down here.

‘Sorry, Mum,’ Louise says out loud, even though Elizabeth obviously isn’t there to hear her. ‘I know you want me to run the bakery, and I’m so, so sorry, but it’s not what I want.’

But still.

That food mixer.

Those ingredients.

And the fact that she’s standing here in the very kitchen where her beloved grandmother baked her famous ginger cake.

Louise opens the lid of the box and pulls out the mixer. She plugs it in. And, although it’s empty, she turns it on, just to hear it whirr. Just for a few seconds.

And a few seconds is all it takes.

Something short-circuits, plunging the whole place into darkness.

It must be a fuse, but she has no idea where the fuse box is.

Disoriented, Louise instinctively puts one hand onto the cold worktop to steady herself. She spent half her childhood in this kitchen, learning to bake with her granny and her mother, she knows it like the back of her hand, and yet she cannot quite fathom where the door is. She gropes her way along the worktop, stubbing her toe on something. She mutters an expletive then quickly says, ‘Sorry, gran.’ Because although her grandmother might have passed away twenty years ago, Louise has always felt her presence here – not in a ghostly, Uncanny-podcast kind of way (her mother believes in that stuff, but Louise doesn’t). More like her granny’s essence has seeped into the fabric of the place.

She’s in the corridor now, walking sideways like a crab with both hands on the walls. There’s a chair in front of her, and a table too, and Louise takes hold of the back, manoeuvring her way around it, edging closer to the front door. She’ll just go up to the flat and sort the fuse out in the morning.

And then she realises.