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Joel shrugged. “I’m hoping this is the first and last time I have to organize the thing.”

Mara looked at the small table, then at the stack of papers already threatening to slide onto the floor. Gabe saw the problem before she said anything. There was a larger table against the side wall mostly used to stack empty baskets at this time of day.

“You’ll have more room here.” Gabe lifted the baskets away and carried them behind the counter.

Mara looked up. “Thank you.” She collected her bag from the chair.

“Coffee?”

“Yes, please.”

Gabe poured it, added milk, and set it beside her before going back to the counter. Behind him, Joel was already gathering papers.

“So,” Mara said. “Show me what you’ve got.”

Gabe picked up a pastry brush. He had work to do. But every so often, without quite meaning to, he found himself looking toward the table where Mara leaned in, listening to Joel.

For the next half hour, the bakery settled into an easy rhythm. Gabe worked through the trays waiting for him, checking the ovens, refilling the display case, and serving customers. Behind him, Mara and Joel talked quietly over the festival schedules.

He tried not to listen. He wasn’t particularly successful.

“So the vendors don’t need another schedule,” Mara was saying. “They need to know what they’re waiting on. If someone can’t unload until a vehicle moves, put that on the same line. Otherwise everyone thinks their part starts at nine when actually three other things have to happen first.”

Joel made a thoughtful sound. “That obvious?”

“Only once somebody points it out.”

“Good. I feel better.”

Mara laughed. Gabe glanced over. She had pushed her sleeves up and was leaning over the table, one hand resting beside Joel’s laptop while the other traced something down the page. Her coffee sat forgotten near her elbow. She looked completely absorbed. And happy.

Gabe turned back to the dough beneath his hands. She fit here. That was what he kept coming back to. She had been in Bear Creek a few days, and she was sitting in his bakery straightening out Joel’s festival as if she had always had a chair at that table. Did she see it too? Or was this what she did everywhere she went, before she went home?

A few minutes later Mara laughed again, louder this time, and his head came up. Joel was grinning at him.

Gabe narrowed his eyes. “What have you been saying?”

“Nothing.”

Mara’s expression was far too innocent.

“That wasn’t nothing,” Gabe countered.

Joel picked up his coffee. “I was telling her about the time you entered the apple bobbing competition.”

Gabe rolled his eyes. “I was five. And had no idea Nate had replaced one of the real apples with a plastic one.”

“That thing bobbed and bobbed, and Gabe got madder and madder,” Joel said.

Mara was trying not to laugh now.

Gabe pointed at Joel with the scraper in his hand. “You wouldn’t have been able to pick it up with your mouth either.”

“But no matter how many times it popped up out of his reach, he was not going to let it beat him,” Joel said. “Even though he was slowly tipping farther and farther into the barrel.”

“Oh, poor little Gabe,” Mara said, shaking her head and dabbing her eyes. “What happened?”

He is making her laugh at us, his bear complained.