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"What is this posture, Hayes?" he had asked, his voice cutting cleanly through the hum of the ovens. "You hunch over the bowl like a peasant churning butter. Your elbows are locked. You work with your spine, not your shoulders. And this dough—look at the shine. The eggs were cold, yes?"

"They were on the counter for ten minutes, Chef," Emma had answered, her words catching in her throat.

Emma had stood there, facing eighteen pairs of eyes, feeling the heat rise from her collarbone until her cheeks burned. Her fingers had trembled so violently against the edge of the stainless steel that she had dropped her scraper. She had fled into the dry-goods supply closet under the guise of fetching more caster sugar, sinking onto an upturned sack of flour with her knees drawn to her chest. She had buried her face in her stiff canvas apron and sobbed until her ribs ached, suffocated by the language barrier, the shame of being utterly out of her depth.

She had wanted to run. She had thought about packing her single suitcase, catching the Eurostar at Gare du Nord, and begging Nate for a shift washing dishes in the café.

Instead, she had wiped her nose on her sleeve, scrubbed her face with cold water at the sink, and walked back to station four. She had set her digital scale to zero. She had cracked eggs into a stainless steel bowl, weighed the yolk to the exact gram, and whisked until her triceps screamed.

Now, four weeks later, she worked with the French kitchen, not against it.

Emma wiped the sweat from her brow with her wrist. She slid the tray of shaped croissants into the proving cabinet, dialed the humidity to eighty percent, and set her digital timer.

Two hours later, the smell of caramelized butter and toasted wheat filled the room. Emma pulled the heavy sheet from the deck oven. Twelve croissants rested in rows, mahogany on the ridges, pale gold in the crevices, flaking into paper-thin shards at the slightest breath of air.

Chef Laurent stopped at station four. The room went quiet.

He didn't speak. He reached down with bare fingers, picking up the center pastry. The crust shattered under his thumb with a clean, dry crunch. Laurent drew a serrated blade from his apron, slicing the croissant down the middle. He pulled the halves apart, inspecting the internal structure.

The crumb was open, a honeycomb of thin membranes holding pockets of steam.

Laurent lifted one half to his nose, inhaled the cultured butter, and bit down. He chewed slowly, staring at the white tile wall opposite her bench.

Emma felt her pulse hammer against her ribs but she held her spine straight, her hands clasped behind her back the way he demanded.

Laurent swallowed. He brushed a flake of pastry from his knuckle.

"Acceptable," he murmured, his face impassive. "The lamination is even. You finally stopped fighting the butter."

He set the half back on the parchment and moved to station five without another word.

Emma let out an exhale that rattled her collarbones. A grin broke across her mouth, private and fiercely earned. It was the closest thing to an accolade Laurent ever gave.

✽✽✽

The vibration of the train rattled through Emma’s boots as the Line 8 metro swayed on its tracks. Twelve-hour shifts at the academy were a mercy; as long as her hands were elbow-deep in flour and her mind was calculating oven temperatures, there was no room in her skull to bleed.

It was the quiet commute home that ambushed her.

Still riding the high of Laurent's approval, Emma pulled her phone from her pocket as the train slowed toward Bastille. On pure instinct, her thumb had unlocked the screen, opened a pinned message thread, and typed three words: He liked it.

Emma's heart dropped into her stomach as she stared at the name at the top of the screen. Victoria.

Just behind her in the crowded car, a woman in a wool coat spoke into her phone in American English—a low voice that cut cleanly through the screech of the brakes—and the faint scent of orange blossom drifted past Emma's face. Emma’s lungs locked up. She deleted the draft with a frantic jab of her thumb, shoved the phone into her bag, and bolted out the doors at Bastille, taking the tiled stairs two at a time just to drag air back into her chest.

Her life in Paris was nothing like the insular world of Rosebrook. Here, she was a stranger among millions. Most of the time, the anonymity felt like a clean room. Other times, it just felt like a place where nobody knew why she couldn't breathe on the subway.

Every morning at six, before heading to the academy, she walked to the Marché d'Aligre. The vendors were setting up wooden crates under striped awnings, shouting prices over the clatter of hand trucks. At first, she had pointed timidly at crates, butchering her numbers and retreating with bruised fruit.

Now, she had territory.

She stopped in front of the dairy stall run by a broad-shouldered Breton named Mathieu. The air around his counter smelled of brine and fermented cream.

"Deux beurres demi-sel, s’il vous plaît,” Emma said, leaning over the counter, her voice steady.

Mathieu looked up from his cheese wheel, squinting. "Oh, salut l'Anglaise! What are you going to bake this time?"

"Testing pear tarts," Emma replied in French, tapping her canvas tote against the wood. "I need the high-fat block. The one from the wooden mold, not the wrapped stuff."