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“That’s the secret. I can never get mine right. The filling is too sweet.”

“Cut the sugar by a third and add a pinch of salt. The sesame carries the sweetness on its own if you let it.”

Mrs. Park beamed. She reached across the counter and patted Lucy’s hand. “Your mother would be proud of this place. I’m going to tell her Sunday, when I see her for mahjong.”

Lucy’s throat tightened, then she held Mrs. Park’s hand for a beat longer than necessary, let go, and fetched the custard bun and tea. She’d taught herself long ago to function through feelings that would stop most people cold.

She poured Mrs. Park’s green tea with a steady hand. Golden Lotus had been closed for eight years, but the recipes lived on—in Lucy’s hands and in her mother’s cramped handwriting on index cards tucked into a shoebox beneath her bed. Her father kept them alive, too, still correcting her knife technique when she visited on Sundays. The restaurant was gone. The knowledge survived. She had built Flour & Honey on that distinction, and most days, it was enough.

When she returned to the table, Knox wasn’t watching the numbers or his phone. He was watching her. His expression was unreadable.

“Red bean buns,” he said.

“My mother’s recipe. From the restaurant she used to run.”

She hadn’t meant to say that much. The words came out before the filter engaged, carried by the residual pressure of Mrs. Park’s hand on hers.

Knox nodded. He didn’t ask which restaurant. He didn’t ask what happened to it. His gaze rested on Lucy, calm and unhurried. Then he picked up his pen and returned to the budget.

The restraint was worse than questions. Questions she could deflect. This quiet awareness felt like being seen by someone who understood that seeing was sometimes enough.

They finished the budget review in twenty minutes. Knox had organized the final summary into a single page, clean, orderly, with room at the bottom for notes. She added three items he’d missed, a dessert table runner, serving platters that weren’t hotel-grade stainless, and a backup generator for the venue’s outdoor space because she’d worked enough events to know the power could fail at the worst possible moment.

Knox wrote down every suggestion without editing a single one. She watched him write “backup generator” and underline it twice. Her pulse skipped, a small, inconvenient thing she refused to name.

“I’ll send the revised version to Tessa tonight,” he said, closing the binder. “She’ll want to review it before the next full meeting.”

“Fine.”

He stood and buttoned his jacket with automatic ease, a habit polished by years of prep school. Then he paused, looking past Lucy toward the wall behind the register.

She followed his gaze to the family photo, to her parents, her sister Jane, and her at twelve, all standing outside Golden Lotus on its twentieth anniversary. Her father wore his chef’s whites, her mother held a pair of gold scissors for the ceremonial ribbon, Jane grinned with a gap in her front teeth, and Lucy pressed against her mother’s hip, fierce and proprietary, certain that restaurant would stand forever.

Knox’s gaze settled on the photo, moved to Lucy, then returned to the photo. He picked up his binder. “Tuesday worked,” he said. “Same time next week?”

“If you tell Tessa yes on the wildflowers.”

“Already done.” He tucked the binder under his arm. “The red bean buns. Do you make your mother’s recipe here?”

The question caught her sideways. “No. Those were my mother’s. This bakery is mine.”

He held her gaze for a beat. “That’s a good answer.”

He left. The bell over the door chimed, and the bakery settled around his absence like water filling a space where a stone had been.

Marco appeared from the kitchen. He leaned against the doorframe, arms crossed, towel over one shoulder.

“So?” he said.

“So what?”

“So he doubled your catering estimate without arguing, memorized your neighbor’s lease patterns, and sat through an entire budget meeting without once suggesting you’d be better off with a cheaper option. That’s not a man pinching pennies for his buddy’s wedding, Lucy. That’s a man who’s paying attention.”

“He’s paying attention to numbers. It’s what he does.”

“He was paying attention to you when Mrs. Park was talking about your mom.”

Lucy straightened the chairs Knox had left perfectly aligned. “He was being polite.”