“Chicken’s fine,” I said.
“I wasn’t talking about the chicken.” She took a sip from her own cup—she always had her own cup—and glanced up at me with a look that had too much knowing in it. “The girl from the bakery. Brenna. She coming today?”
“How would I know?”
“Because you’ve checked the parking lot four times in the last ten minutes. I counted.”
I didn’t respond to that. Bev patted my arm once and walked away, and I heard her laughing softly as she went.
Twenty minutes later, I saw her.
She came around the side of the fire hall on foot, which meant she’d walked from Main Street. She was wearing a pale yellow sundress, and her hair was pulled back in a way that showed her neck and the line of her jaw. She had a foil-covered pan balanced on one hand and her keys in the other. Her eyes moved across the crowd in quick, short sweeps—never landing on anyone long enough to risk eye contact. Her hand fidgeted with the keys, turning them over between her fingers, and her weight shifted from one foot to the other like she hadn’t fully committed to standing still.
I watched her shoulders tighten as she took in the crowd. She didn’t know most of these people. She’d been in town a year, buta year of predawn baking shifts and sixteen-hour days behind a counter didn’t leave much room for socializing.
She was about to turn around. I could see it—the slight pivot of her foot, the way her hand tightened around the keys. She was calculating the exit.
I pulled off my gloves and walked toward her.
Her eyes found me when I was about fifteen feet away, and something in her posture changed. Not a lot. Just the foot that had been pivoting settled flat again. Her chin came up. The pan steadied in her grip.
“You came,” I said.
“I made a cake.” She held up the pan like evidence. “I figured if the fire department is doing a fundraiser, the least I could do is contribute something. Since you—” She stopped. “Anyway. Cake.”
“What kind?”
“Brown butter banana bread. It’s not technically a cake, but it’s in a cake pan, so.” She half-smiled. “Where do I put it?”
I led her to the dessert table near the pavilion, and she set the pan down between a plate of Bev’s brownies and a store-bought pie still in its plastic shell. She peeled back the foil and adjusted the edges like she was staging a display case, and I stood there watching her hands move—quick and precise, the gauze on her right palm smaller now, taped down at the edges over a burn that was still pink but no longer raw.
“You baked this in your apartment,” I said.
“I have a decent oven. It’s not commercial grade, but it gets the job done.” She straightened up and wiped her hands on her dress. “I couldn’t just sit up there. I needed to make something.”
The way she said it—needed, not wanted—told me more about Brenna Mills than anything else she’d shared so far. Baking wasn’t her job. It was how she processed the world.When everything else fell apart, she made something with her hands and put it in front of people and hoped they’d take a piece.
“Come on,” I said. “I’ll get you a plate.”
She followed me back to the grills, and I loaded a plate with a burger, some of Bev’s potato salad, and a piece of grilled chicken that I’d pulled off at the exact right moment because I’d been timing everything today like my life depended on it. She took the plate and sat on the low wall behind my station, tucking her legs to one side and balancing the plate on her knee.
“You run this every year?” she asked.
“Zain runs it. I do the grills.”
“Because you’re the only one who won’t burn a burger.”
“He said that?”
“No, I’m guessing.” She bit into the burger and closed her eyes for a second—just a second—and when she opened them, she pointed at it. “This is really good.”
“It’s a burger.”
“It’s a perfectly cooked burger, and I don’t say that lightly. I have opinions about food. Strong ones.”
I leaned against the prep table and crossed my arms. “What kind of opinions?”
“The kind that made me redo a buttercream recipe forty-seven times before I put it on the menu. The kind that had me driving to three different suppliers because the flour I wanted wasn’t available locally.” She shrugged. “My old boss called me relentless. I think he meant it as a compliment, but I’m not sure.”
