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“I tried a new blend.”

“Try the old one.”

Lucy fixed the tea herself, steeping it for exactly four minutes because Mrs. Hadley could detect a thirty-second deviation and would comment on it. Mrs. Hadley had standards and saw no reason to relax them. She plated the scone, carried both to the counter, and set them down.

Mrs. Hadley inspected the scone, nodded, and glanced past Lucy to where Knox sat at the window table, surrounded by paper.

“New accountant?” Mrs. Hadley asked.

“Wedding planner. Sort of.”

Mrs. Hadley looked Knox over without hurry, without comment, and with the certainty that her conclusions were correct. She picked up her tea, her scone, and her garment bag, and left without another word.

Lucy returned to the table. Knox had been watching the exchange with the attention he gave data he hadn’t expected to encounter.

“Your landlord?” he asked.

“My neighbor. She runs the dry cleaner next door. She also rented me this space when I was twenty-four and had a business plan written on the back of a menu.”

“At below market rate?”

Lucy’s eyes sharpened. “How did you know that?”

“The commercial lease rates in this corridor average eighteen to twenty-two dollars per square foot. Based on your square footage and your pricing, you’re operating at margins that only work if your rent is significantly below market.” He paused. “I wasn’t investigating. I notice numbers.”

“You notice everything.”

“It’s a professional habit.”

“It’s an invasive one.”

Knox conceded this with a tilt of his head that might have been an apology from a man who rationed those. “I’ll try to notice less.”

“Don’t make promises you won’t keep.”

They returned to the budget. Her end of it was dessert and nothing more, but Knox wanted a second eye on the rest, so he walked her through the photography packages Tessa was weighing, and Lucy waved off three of the four because the sample reels looked like they were shot through a filter designed by someone who’d never been to an actual wedding.

Knox made a note. She suggested a photographer Tessa had mentioned, a woman who worked from a studio in Red Hook and shot on film. Knox scanned the cost and didn’t flinch. He made another note.

They argued about flowers. Knox favored structured arrangements with calculable per-stem costs. Lucy favored whatever Tessa wanted, which was wildflowers that looked like they’d been picked from a meadow ten minutes before the ceremony, which was, from a sourcing perspective, more expensive than the structured option.

“Wildflowers aren’t wild when you’re ordering them for an event with two hundred guests,” Knox said.

“That’s the point. They’re supposed to look effortless. Effortless is expensive.”

“That is the most accurate thing anyone has ever said to me.”

His tone was dry, but Lucy caught surprise beneath it, the faint recalibration of Knox encountering an idea he hadn’t generated himself.

She almost laughed.

The door chimed again. Mrs. Park, who came every Tuesday and Thursday for a custard bun and a green tea, settled into her usual seat by the pastry case. She was eighty-three, carried a canvas bag printed with cats, and had been coming to the bakery since the first week Lucy opened.

“Lucy, dear.” Mrs. Park waved her over. Lucy rose and crossed over to slip behind the counter. “I tried your mother’s red bean bun recipe. The one from the old restaurant. Do you remember? Your mother used to put a little black sesame in the filling.”

The question landed like a stone dropped into deep water.

“I remember,” she said. Her voice was soft with Mrs. Park, stripped of the professional polish she wore around vendors and wedding planners and men who arrived minutes early. “She toasted the sesame first. Low heat, until you could smell it from the next room.”