The first thing I noticed was the key. Not the way it glinted under the pastry case lights, not the way my fingers hovered over it like it could burn me—just the fact that it was finally sitting still, right where everyone could see it. My spare key.
Folded apron beneath it, corners squared like a flag laid down after a long war. Across the counter, my sister’s mascara was running in black rivers. My mother’s hand was clamped over her own mouth like she could hold the truth in with her palm.
My father looked like the air had been sucked out of his lungs. And in the doorway, the man Haley had been calling her billionaire fiancé—Boston society’s favorite headline—walked past her like she was a decorative column and came straight to me. “I’ve been trying to meet you for six months,” he said, and the whole room went pale.
That was when I realized the bell above my door didn’t just ring. It announced consequences. The heat from the oven hit my face like a physical slap, but it was my mother’s voice through the phone speaker that made my skin prickle cold.
“Haley wants everything perfect tonight,” she said. “Aesthetic, you know. And well… you always have that smell on you, that yeast smell.
Your hands are always stained.”
I had one oven mitt on, one bare hand braced under a tray of sourdough that weighed like a brick. Four hundred degrees Fahrenheit. The metal edge bit through the towel into my palm.
“Mom,” I said, because if I didn’t say her name, I might say something that would scorch. “You look like a peasant, Abigail.” She said it the way you’d say the sky was overcast. Not cruel, not kind.
Just… a fact she expected me to accept. I stared at the tray. The crust was perfect—blistered, golden, alive.
My bakery smelled like butter and brown sugar and the clean tang of fermentation. The kind of smell that makes strangers stop at my window and smile without knowing why. To my mother, it was shame.
“What are you saying?” I asked. “I’m saying it doesn’t fit the old Boston vibe she’s curating.” My mother’s voice turned softer, like she was trying to make the insult easier to swallow. “You understand.”
It wasn’t a question.
Behind me, the convection ovens hummed their familiar rhythm. Timers beeped. Marcus—my sous-chef—called out, “Two almond croissants walking!
The story doesn’t end here –
it continues on the next page.
TAP → NEXT PAGE → 👇
