@weavingduck - Tumblr Blog

May 17

burnt sugar

pairing: patrick sumner x fem!baker character

summary───Patrick Sumner drifts into Hull about a month before the Volunteer sails for the Arctic—just long enough to form a routine. Across the apothecary on Clifford Street, he finds himself repeatedly drawn to a small bakery that refuses to feel temporary. He tells himself it is nothing, a distraction to pass the time, a habit he will abandon easily. But on the night before he is set to depart for the waters of the North Sea, he finally stops pretending he can leave unchanged without acknowledging this unintentional constant. [wc: 15.5k]

note: what's better than one cake? two! my submission for @foxtufts's “two cakes” event. thank you so much for putting this together. i watched too much dead poets society and too much pride&prejudice, and found myself yet again, yapping too much. this goes on way too long for nothing that happens. anyways, enjoy!

contents: slow burn, yearning, mutual pining, quiet intimacy, no smut/“fade-to-black”, unnamed/non-descriptive character, touch starved sumner, ptsd, vague mention of substance abuse (opium + laudanum), period typical attitudes, bakery setting, age difference, anniversary, separation/reunion, presumed dead, unexpected pregnancy/surprise child, odysseus/penelope + darcy/elizabeth coded.

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HULL, ENGLAND. MAY 2, 1859.

The morning after May Day broke thin and pale over Hull, as if the sky had not quite decided to fully commit to spring. The hard rains of March and April had finally lessened these past days, yet the damp remained in everything all the same.

Yesterday’s May Day revelry had turned dust to paste—muddy foot prints dried into the cobbles of Clifford Street long after all the cheer had gone stale. Flags hung limp from upper windows, their colors dimmed. Someone had left a crushed flower crown in the gutter beside the base of the Freemanson’s Hall, its white petals browned at the edges overnight. A persistent wind came off the water, worrying at hems, sleeves, and loose shutters with quiet insistence.

Sunlight slipped in through the bakery window, catching on the glass that would display the day’s freshly baked wares. The brick above had been painted with the words: FLETCHER’S BAKERY, in a hand that had long since faded. Beneath, the older board still read N.C. WHEELWRIGHT HULL, and the smaller wooden sign—tucked between the window and the front corner entrance—promised PIES and CAKES, AT MARKET PRICES. The bakery looked as weathered and stubborn as anything else in Hull.

She had been up before most.

The ovens were already lit—basking the room in a steady heat, coaxed rather than forced. The first loaves had gone in while the town still yawned itself awake. By the time the bell of the nearby timber yard in Queen’s Dock struck six, the bakery smelled of savory meat pies and something faintly sweet beginning to brown at the edges.

Sugar remained dear enough that most working folk treated sweetness as occasion rather than habit. But people still liked comfort where they could find it. And Fletcher’s sold comfort better than anyone on Clifford Street. Mostly because of her. Everyone knew it, though no one said it plain.

The bakery belonged to Mr. Fletcher, a widower in worsening health who seldom appeared at the shop except to inspect accounts or complain about flour prices. But she ran the bakery in every meaningful sense. She knew who owed money and who would pay honest when wages came in. She knew which sailors preferred pepper in their pies and which widows liked yesterday’s loaves sold half-cheap near closing. She knew which children stole sugared crusts and which only stared longingly at them through the glass.

She moved easily in the space, sleeves rolled above the elbow, apron tied twice, hair pinned but already escaping in habitual defiance. She worked with the unhurried efficiency of someone who had learned her craft young and whose hands knew the work well enough without needing to think about the mechanical parts of it. Slap, fold, turn, repeat. The dough yielded under her hands as it always did. There was comfort in such work—things that turned pliant when handled the right way. It left her attention free to go wherever it liked. And it liked, presently, to wander.

She hummed while she worked, as she always did, low in her throat, something with no fixed tune to it. The absentminded sort of singing that rose naturally from someone content enough in her own company not to notice silence. Bits of old folk tunes wandered in and out without finishing them properly. A snatch of “Barbara Allen.” Half a line from “The Water of Tyne.” Something sailors sometimes sang coming upriver after drink.

A line of prepared loaves waited proofing beneath cloth, rising slow and obedient. She delicately checked them with the back of her fingers, feeling its resistance.

“Not yet,” she murmured to herself.

Outside, the town began its usual turning. Foot traffic moved slowly, everyone having spent too much of themselves already the night before. The wheels of a cart rattling loudly over uneven stone. The butcher next door calling a boy to an errand. The door of the De La Pole Tavern down the alley opening, then closing again sharp enough to set a dog barking. From the alley behind the bakery came the sudden crash of emptied bottles and a string of inventive profanity from someone who had clearly not survived May Day celebrations gracefully.

The world went on. The street gathered itself gradually, piece by piece.

She did not look when the bell above the shop door gave its small, uncertain ring.

“Not open yet,” she called out matter-of-factly, still shaping dough between her hands.

There was no answer.

And that, more than anything, made her glance up.

He stood just within the threshold of the bakery, as if he had not quite committed to fully entering.

It was plain to see that he was not local.

His coat alone marked him apart from the threadbare attire worn by the dockmen outside. Good wool, good stitching, serviceable without being fashionable. His boots were clean despite the streets. Dark gloves carried in one hand. His posture was too deliberate to be careless, though there was none of the easy assurance one saw in the “better” sort of gentlemen either. Something in between, and ill-fitted to both.

“Good morning,” she said.

He hesitated a fraction too long before replying.

“Good morning.”

His voice was low and even. Softer than the Yorkshire accents around the docks. Educated too. Carefully leveled into something nearer London speech, though certain vowels betrayed him despite the effort.

He looked at the counter rather than her face.

That, too, she noticed.

“You’ll have to wait,” she said, softer now. “Bread’s not ready.”

He glanced toward the window, as though to confirm it.

“I had thought—” He stopped, then gave a slight, almost self-conscious correction. “I can wait.”

She tilted her head slightly, studying him with a frankness that would have unsettled some men. It did not seem to trouble him much. He simply endured it with a kind of practiced detachment.

“Rght then,” she said after a moment. “They won’t be long.”

He inclined his head once. Then stood by the nearest window while she returned to her work. He kept his hands at his sides as his eyes gaze swept about the space in a way that was unhurried and systematic. The shelves with their stacked tins and folded cloth. The boards worn pale where feet had crossed them for twenty years. Her. The oven’s warmth coming through in steady intervals. The cooling racks by the window display. Her. The cracks in the brickwork near the chimney breast. The knife beside the board. Her.

She felt his eyes land on her sooner than she let on.

“Have I flour on my face?” she asked without looking at him.

“No.”

“Then what is it—why do you stare so hard?”

“I was observing.”

She smiled faintly at that, still working.

“Well, mind you do not observe too closely,” she said, folding the dough neatly back upon itself. “You’ll find fault where there is none, and then we’ll both be put out.”

There was no answering smile from him—if he was inclined to such things—but something in his manner shifted, if only by a fraction.

She turned her attention back to the oven.

Lifting the heavy iron door with a folded cloth wrapped around her hand, she felt the rush of heat against her face like breath, carrying with it the rich smell of bread and scorched grain. She drew free one of the morning loaves, frowning softly. It was not the finest of the batch. The crust had taken well, browning evenly across the top, but a crack had split along the left side where the heat had caught it too quickly. She set it on the board and considered it.

“Ah,” she muttered under her breath, sounding displeased.

She took up the bread knife and cut into it regardless. Steam rose from the cut in a slow curl, warm and fragrant. She tore the rest off—a rough piece of the heel—and crossed the room to him.

“Here,” she said, pressing it into his hand before he might refuse. “Mind yourself—it’s hot.”

He looked briefly startled by the gesture. Most men in Hull would have taken it without thought. Thanked her, or made some remark upon the smell or the look of it. But he hesitated a moment, as though he were unused to receiving things freely, before lifting it to his mouth and tasting it. The only reaction she could see was a brief lowering of the eyes as he considered the flavor seriously.

She found that oddly interesting.

Turning away before he might notice her watching, she selected a proper loaf from the batch and wrapped it neatly in paper, tying the string twice before setting it on the counter.

Their hands did not touch when he took it.

“Passing through?” she asked while taking his coin. It was the sort of question one asked without meaning anything by it. Most would have answered just as easily.

“No,” he said. “Not exactly.”

She tilted her head, a fraction.

“Staying, then?”

“For a time.”

“Well,” she said. “Hull’s a fine enough city, if you don’t mind what it smells like.”

The corner of his mouth twitched.

“I am a man of modest expectations,” he said.

She laughed at that.

He inclined his head slightly, and there was something almost surprised in it, as though the sound had caught him off-guard. Then, after the smallest pause: “Thank you,” and left as quietly as he had come.

The bell gave its single note again, and the door shut behind him with a soft, final sound.

She stood watching for a moment after it shut behind him, the coin still warm in her palm. The room returned back to what it always was, after all, nothing had occurred, really. Only a stranger buying bread.

Across the street, the apothecary’s shutters had opened at last. The stranger who had just left her shop paused there only briefly, before turning and disappearing farther down Clifford Street into the gray morning crowd.

And though she immediately took up her humming as she worked—the day would go on, as it always did—she found herself glancing more than once toward the window.

That was how it began.

It went like that, at first. Not daily or with the expected regularity of calling it routine—yet. But frequent enough that after the first week she had stopped pretending the set-aside loaf was incidental.

He came at different hours. Sometimes early, sometimes later. He never stayed long, never lingered over talk the way some men did—leaning too easily on the counter, asking questions they had no business asking. He spoke when spoken to. Answered plainly. Offered little else.

She did not ask where he went when he left. Did not ask his business at the apothecary, though she had seen him there often enough now to have formed a quiet opinion about it.

It was not her place to say.

“You keep odd hours,” she remarked one morning, setting his order before him.

“I have no fixed employment at present.”

“Ah.” She nodded, as though that settled it, though in truth it explained very little. “A gentleman at leisure, then.”

“I would not say so.”

“No?” She glanced at him, quick and curious. “You don’t look overjoyed by it.”

“I am not.”

“Well, there you have it,” she said. “Better to be occupied than idle. Idle men grow queer.”

The rain came again on the twentieth, in the afternoon this time. It broke with little warning: the sky darkening fast, the air turning charged, that particular stillness before a storm that set the skin uneasy. The first crack of thunder split the afternoon open and heavy rain followed immediately, striking the glass hard enough to blur the street beyond into shadow and movement.

The customers that remained lingered, unwilling to step out into it.

He was among them. He had come in not long before the storm broke, damp already at the collar from the walk, though he had not remarked upon it.

There was not much space for him to stand idly by—the area by the counter was filled with damp coats, restless children occupied the main floor, the low murmur of strangers made the entire place feel temporarily familiar by circumstance. He had stepped aside to avoid the other customers, then further and further, until he found himself behind the worktable; near enough to her, that she was aware of him without needing to look directly.

“You’ll not earn wages that way,” she said, glancing at him. “Standing where the work is doesn’t make you a baker.”

He huffed a laugh, stifling the sound before it got too far, and looked away.

The storm held. Talk rose and fell around them. Someone laughed too loudly at something. A child began to fret and was shushed. And throughout it all, she worked as she always did.

At some point she reached for the flour and found it nearer than she expected. He had quietly moved it. Simply seen what was wanted and done it.

She glanced at him, but he did not meet her eye.

It was a strange thing, she thought, how quickly a habit formed.

One day a man comes in from the street, no more than any other. A week on and there is a place for him at the counter. Another week and he moves about the room as though he has always known its shape. She did not think on it much.

The morning she finally learned his name came on a fair day after a run of grey ones. Her day began as usual. Yet when the bell did not ring at the hour she had somehow come to expect, she felt it. A small thing, disappointment. Easily dismissed. She pressed her hands into the dough harder than necessary.

“Don’t be foolish,” she muttered to herself.

There were a hundred reasons a man might not come. A thousand. It meant nothing. He owed her nothing, and she him less.

The bell rang. And she looked up at once.

He stood there, as he always did. Nothing altered in his expression, nothing to suggest he knew he was late or that late was even a category that applied to him. And yet she felt, all at once, the release of something she had not known she was holding.

“You’re late,” she said, before she could think better of it.

He paused.

“I beg your pardon?”

She stilled. Then gave a small, dismissive shake of her head before turning toward the counter.

“I had the bread set aside,” she said, as though that explained it. “It’s no matter.”

A beat of silence, broken only by the soft sound of the door closing behind him. His step, nearer now.

“You anticipated my arrival,” he said, stepping nearer now.

She reached for the loaf she had, indeed, set aside.

“Did I?” she replied, lighter than she felt. “That would be a poor habit to fall into. I’d have half the street expecting the same treatment.”

He did not reach for the bread at once.

“I had not meant to be expected,” he said after a moment.

“Well,” she said, with a small lift of her chin, meeting his gaze head on, “you’ve made something of a habit of appearing, haven’t you? Can’t be surprised if a person starts to account for it.”

She saw the realization bloom on his face, clear as anything. The look of a man who had just become aware of his consistency.

“Yes,” he said quietly. “I suppose I have.”

Neither of them spoke for a moment after that.

Then she set his order into his hands.

“Take care, Mr.—?” The question slipped free casually, as though it had not been sitting unanswered for close to three weeks.

He hesitated. Only slightly.

“Sumner,” he said. “Patrick Sumner.”

“Well then,” she said, softer now. “Take care, Mr. Sumner.”

He inclined his head. Then turned, and left as he always did. The bell giving its same small note above the door.

By the time the days had begun to lengthen properly, she no longer needed the bell to know he had come.

She had changed what she baked with the passing of the time. Heavier doughs gave way to lighter ones. Less lard, more fruit, when she could get it at a price worth paying. The dock children had switched their preference almost immediately, with the decisive loyalty of the very young. Even Alderman Coates had taken one on Thursday and asked what was different about it, in the satisfied tone of a man who did not want an explanation, only acknowledgement that something had improved.

Sumner had noticed too.

“You’ve changed it,” he said one morning, turning a small pastry in his hand.

“I have.” She leaned against the worktable and folded her arms. “It’s done the Berlin way.”

“Berlin,” he repeated.

“Aye.”

“You’ve been there.”

“No,” she said easily. “But I’ve known someone who has. He was particular about bread.” She paused. “Particular about most things, as it happened.”

He looked at the pastry rather than at her.

“Bread has no national character,” he said.

“Oh, it does,” she replied. “You’ve simply not eaten enough of it.”

“And what is the character of the Berlin variety?”

She tilted her head. “Less fussy, about how things ought to be done.”

“That is an unusual way to describe a method of baking.”

“I suppose I mean the people, as much as the bread.”

He set it down. “And what did he say of the people?”

She took a breath through her nose, measuring what—and how much—she would give him.

“That they do not ask permission before they become themselves,” she said.

“That sounds intolerable,” he said, after a moment.

“To you, perhaps.”

“And to you?”

She was quiet for a beat. “I prefer honesty,” she said. “Sometimes disorder and honesty look the same thing from a distance.”

He held her gaze.

“You think it would suit you.”

“I think it would not trouble itself about whether it suited me or not,” she said. “Which amounts to much the same.”

“You speak as if you wish to leave,” he said.

“Aye.”

“Seriously.”

“As seriously as anything gets,” she said.

He was quiet a moment. “There is no law that says you must stay.”

“No,” she said, matching his tone. “No law.”

She turned back to the tray and began moving the bread to the cooling rack, unhurried. The sounds of the street came through: cart wheels, voices, the distant industry of the docks. Somewhere beyond the rooftops a gull cried once.

“If you do go wandering off to the ends of the earth,” she said, not looking at him, voice easy, almost offhand, “you could do worse than find somewhere decent after. Mm… Berlin, perhaps.”

He made a quiet huff of amusement.

She smiled, though he could not see it. Then, before she could really think on it, barely loud enough to count:

“Come find me there, if you do.”

She did not make anything of it. Did not look up. Kept moving the bread from cloth to rack as though the words were nothing, had cost her nothing.

But when she finally did glance at him—

He was not smiling. Not frowning either. Only still, in the particular way he went still when something had reached him and he did not yet know what to do with it.

He said nothing about it. Merely, reached for his coin and set it on the counter.

“I expect,” he said, after a moment, voice carefully level, “that I will find myself somewhere in any case. One generally does.”

“Then you’ll find yourself somewhere all the same,” she said, nodding. “Better to choose than be found.”

He inclined his head slightly and reached for his hat.

At the door, he paused. Only briefly. Before stepping out once more. Then he was gone. The bell gave its note above the closed door, and the shop returned to itself.

It was not rain that kept him that day.

Hull had never needed rain to justify a man lingering where he ought not.

Still, the weather lent itself to certain moods. The sky had come down low and gray, pressing itself against the rooftops and chimney pots, holding no warmth within its light. The sort of day that flattened sound and dulled color, as though the whole town had been shut beneath a lid, separate from the rest of the world.

Inside Fletcher's Bakery, she worked with her sleeves rolled high above her elbow, flour dusting her hands white to the wrist. A strand of hair had escaped its pins again and clung to the damp sweat near her temple. Fresh loaves cooled in rows beside the window, while meat pies waited nearer the back, their crusts gone rich and golden from the morning firing.

The shop had settled into one of its quieter hours—the brief and precious sort of breathing space that came with the lull in between customers. The ovens held their heat without needing tending, the morning wives had already come and gone with their baskets, and the dockmen would not appear from the wharf until nearer midday. Even the butcher next door had momentarily quieted, his boy no longer clattering about outside by walls.

That was when the bell above the door gave its muted ring, signaling a customer. And considering a certain blossoming routine over the preceding days and weeks, she did not look up immediately, already coming to recognise the particular quality of his entry.

“You’ll bring the weather in with you at this rate,” she said, hands still deep in dough, pressing forward with the heel of her palm before folding it neatly back upon itself.

“If I possessed authority over the weather,” came the familiar voice, dry as old paper, “I should choose something less oppressive.”

That earned him a glance of faint amusement.

Patrick Sumner stood just inside the door drawing off his gloves finger by finger. He looked, as he always did, like a man assembled with care; the coat well-cut if not recent, the hat set at the precise angle of someone who had learned to perform a certain kind of gentility and had been performing it long enough that it had become almost second nature. Almost. She had noticed it early on since he had first appeared at her counter, that there was always something slightly behind the performance, some effort in the composure. A man who had learned to look like he belonged in a room could not entirely conceal the learning.

He set his coin down upon the counter and waited, as he always did.

Usually he took whatever he had ordered for the day, exchanged some dry remark or observation that pretended not to be conversation, and left again. The exchange was brief and pleasant in its way, carrying with it the comfortable fiction that he had come in only for bread and nothing else. She had been content to let him have the fiction. Men like him often needed more time than most to admit to themselves what they were actually doing.

But today, when she fetched the parcel wrapped for him, he did not reach for it and turn to leave immediately.

Instead, he reached into his coat and drew something out.

A book. Old and weathered and obviously well-loved. The leather worn soft at the corners, the spine cracked in a way that spoke of use rather than neglect. Pages uneven at the edge, some earmarked, some turned more often than others.

She watched him open it with the absent familiarity of a habit formed long before her and this place.

“You’ve taken to settling in,” she remarked lightly, tying string around his order with neat, practised movements, but not pushing it across just yet.

“I was not aware I required permission to read,” he said without looking up.

“You don’t,” she replied easily. “Though staying to do it suggests a dangerous slide toward comfort.”

That drew his eyes up at last. There was the briefest flicker of amusement there before it disappeared again beneath his usual reserve.

She held his gaze for a moment with a small, unhurried smile, before signaling with her eyes and the faintest inclination of her head toward the corner of the room.

There was a chair there. An old thing with one uneven leg, low-backed and plain, pushed against the wall. It had been in the bakery since before she could remember. Mostly for deliveries. Occasionally commandeered by old Alderman Coates, who came in on Thursdays to rest his bad leg, and had more to say about harbor tariffs and the dockyard commission than anyone had asked for.

Sumner had never used it. Never, so far as she could recall, even given it so much as a glance. Until now.

He crossed to it without comment and sat down, long legs stretched before him, book opened across one knee as though he had always belonged—some missing shape of a puzzle quietly slotting itself into position.

It should have looked out of place. Him, there, in his good coat, with his careful vowels and his London manners in a bakery on Clifford Street while the gray May morning pressed itself against the glass. But it did not. Something about him fit the room in ways she suspected he himself would have disliked knowing.

She turned back to the counter and said nothing about it. Flour dusted the boards beneath her hands as she kneaded another round of dough with practiced motions. Her eyes, however, had a will of their own, and they wandered more than once in his direction.

His hands, particularly. Surgeon’s hands. Long-fingered. Deft digits sliding between the words with the familiarity of someone who knew exactly what he was looking for. Precise even at rest. One thumb hooking lightly between the pages to keep his place, as the other hand came to rest open against his knee.

She realised she was staring.

“What is it?” she asked quickly, clearing her throat to rid herself of the sudden heat climbing up it.

“A poem,” he answered without looking up.

She gave him a look at that.

“That’s a monstrous object for a poem.”

“It is an old one.”

Curiosity overcame dignity as she leaned slightly over the counter. “Well…? Go on, then.”

A beat passed before he answered with faint reluctance.

“Homer. The Iliad.”

She blinked.

“That old thing?” she said.

That made him look up. Fully draw his focus away from the words on the page, his eyes drinking her in a new light, as though some internal calculation had gone subtly awry.

“You know it,” he said.

She shrugged one shoulder, as though it were nothing at all. “Well enough.”

“From where?” he asked.

There it was. An educated man’s unconscious sorting of the world into probable and improbable things. She recognized it at once. Women like her were not expected to know Homer. Not bakers’ girls with flour on their aprons and dough beneath their nails. And certainly not women from such a place as Hull.

She turned back toward the counter before answering.

“Same place anyone learns anything,” she said mildly. “From someone who knew it before.”

“That is not an answer.”

“No,” she said. “But it’s the truth of it.”

He closed the book halfway over one finger.

“It is not commonly read in establishments such as this.”

She stilled only briefly.

“Oh? You presume much,” she said.

The room quieted around them. Outside, somewhere down the street, cartwheels rattled over stone.

She looked back at him then, lightly leaning her weight against the counter.

“And yet,” she said, “here you are.”

Something flickered across his expression.

“I was educated,” he said.

It came out sharper than he intended. She could not tell if it was pride, or the particular defensiveness of a man who had worked very hard for a thing and was not quite ready for people to know it.

“I should hope so,” she replied lightly without flinching. “You speak like a man who’s swallowed several libraries and found each one disappointing.”

“That is not what I meant,” he said, narrowing his gaze a fraction.

“I know what you meant.”

And she did. He meant class, station, the probability of someone like her having access to such literature—or any at that. The invisible lines English society drew around knowledge and who had the right to possess it. She suspected he had learned those lines the hard way. Spent years crossing them, erasing them from himself, replacing Irish with English and labour with learning. He believed in them even as he resented them. Perhaps because of it.

But she did not resent him for it. Not entirely. Because she knew a man could hold a wrong idea and still be worth talking to, provided he was capable of loosening his grip on the belief that such distinctions mattered.

“You think it odd,” she went on, “that I should know the name of a book like that. That I should know anything of it at all.”

“I think it unusual,” he said, more measured now.

She tilted her head. “That’s a kinder word for it.”

She bent toward the shelf beneath the counter. Low and half-hidden beneath folded linens and stacked tins sat several books loosely tied with ribbon to keep their covers from warping in the damp. Gathering them carefully, she laid them upon the countertop.

“You’re not the only one with habits,” she said.

He was on his feet before she had quite finished setting them down.

She had not quite seen him rise. He had simply moved, leaving the Iliad on the chair and crossing the floor, stopping at the counter with his eyes on the small stack of volumes with an attention he had not, until this moment, directed at anything in the room.

“May I?” he asked, an apology hidden beneath his careful tone.

There was something in the asking—the instinct to ask rather than simply reach—that registered differently than his other courtesies. Those were largely performance. This was not.

“You may,” she nodded.

The first he picked up was slim, edges softened with use, its cover a dull green. Milton. He opened it at the flyleaf, skimmed the title page, and the slight furrow appeared between his brows.

“Paradise Lost,” he murmured.

“Not all of it,” she admitted. “Some of it’s dreadful, going on too long, if you ask me. Men declaring things at one another for twenty pages.”

“An accurate summary,” he said, holding back a smile.

“But… there are lines in it I like.”

“Such as?”

She hesitated. Then, a little self-conscious despite herself—“The ones that feel like they understand something of falling.”

His eyes lifted sharply to hers. “You understand that, do you?”

She met the look steadily. “I like to think I understand enough.”

He said nothing to that.

“…you’ll lose the argument of it, though,” he said after a moment, thumbing several pages.

“I beg your pardon?”

“Milton,” he vaguely gestured with the book still in his hands. “You said some of it goes on too long. If you only read the passages that please you, you miss the entire architecture of what he is building towards.”

She tilted her head. “And what does he build toward?”

“The justification of God’s ways to man,” he said. “Whether he succeeds in that is another matter entirely.”

“Does he? Succeed, I mean.”

Sumner was quiet for a beat.

“No,” he said, at last. “I don’t think he does. But the attempt is… instructive.”

“Why instructive, if it fails?”

“Because failure of that particular kind is more honest than most successes,” he said. “To look at suffering directly—at why it exists, what it is for, whether it is for anything at all—and to try to make sense of it… even if you arrive at nothing and fail to explain it convincingly. There is something honest in the attempt.”

She listened to all of this with the stillness she reserved for things worth attending to. He rarely spoke at length unless drawn out against his will.

“And what do you think?” she asked softly. “Is it for anything?”

He looked at her. “Suffering?”

She nodded.

“No,” he said, shaking his head. “I think it is simply the condition of living. The baseline. Men invent purpose for it afterward because they find randomness intolerable. I think we do ourselves a great disservice by insisting on meaning where there is only mechanism.”

She was quiet for a moment.

“That’s a very cold way of living,” she said. There was no rebuke in it—only a kind of honest observation one would employ as if remarking on the weather.

“Perhaps,” he said. “But I have found sentiment more dangerous than cold-bloodedness.”

“Dangerous to whom?”

“To whoever has the misfortune of relying on it,” he said.

There were times he spoke as though the world had personally disappointed him beyond repair and he had responded by trying to need nothing from it ever again. Yet he kept returning to the bakery. Which complicated the theory considerably.

She looked at him long enough that he seemed to register it. Then she turned back to the books. The next volume proved to be poetry. Wordsworth mostly. Some Burns copied painstakingly by hand into the back pages.

“Thoreau,” she said conversationally, measuring it in her palm before switching it with the book in his hands, “thought something rather different.”

He looked down at what he was now holding. His expression moved through mild surprise into something approaching dissatisfaction.

“Walden,” he said flatly, examining the “new” book as though he were not quite sure what to make of it. He opened to the page that was marked with a flower pressed between its pages—petals gone near translucent—and read a line or two in silence. “You actually read this?”

Her eyes brightened. “You know it.”

“I know of it.”

“And?”

“And I suspect any man with enough leisure to wander about ponds reflecting on the nature of existence is already sufficiently insulated from most genuine hardship.”

That startled a genuine laugh out of her.

“Oh, you are cruel to him.”

“I am practical.”

“No,” she said cheerfully. “Cruel.”

He thumbed through a few more marked pages with reluctant interest.

“He says,” she began, watching him, “‘one must go to the woods should they wish to live deliberately.’”

“Yes, well… Most men go to the woods because they are starving.”

“That’s not the rest of it and you know it.”

His brow lifted, waiting.

She smiled despite herself and continued, quieter now, more thoughtful than teasing:

“‘To live deep and suck out all the marrow of life… to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, and not, when I had come to die, discover that I had not lived.’”

The words settled differently than the others had. Not with the bright-eyed naïveté he had expected from such sentiments. Perhaps because she believed them. She spoke them plainly, almost stubbornly, as if they were instructions she had chosen for herself long ago.

“Well,” she asked after a moment, “have you?”

“Have I what?”

“‘Sucked out all the marrow of life.’”

A faint line appeared between his brows. “That is an imprecise question.”

“It’s a simple one.”

“No,” he said quietly. “It only sounds simple.”

“You sound,” she said, folding her arms loosely around her midsection, “like a man waiting for his life to begin after it’s already half over.”

A dry laugh escaped him then. “I should hope not. I’m only eight-and-twenty.”

“Mm. And already tired enough for sixty.”

“That is uncharitable.”

“Is it?”

He looked at her again then, properly looked, and she felt the strange weight of it settle over her skin. He had a way of attending to a person that made them feel briefly pinned in place.

“You are very certain of your philosophies for someone so young,” he said.

“And you are very old for a man not yet thirty.”

They shared a small laugh.

He set the poems down and reached for the last. It was a cheap little chapbook of ballads that he turned over more carefully in his hands. Smaller than the others. The most worn. The cover was a pale pink, ink-stained at the corner, the title barely legible. He did not recognize it at once.

“That one’s just verses, mostly,” she said, before he could remark on the state of it. “Passed about. You get them cheap, if you know where to look.”

“Ballads,” he said.

“Aye.”

“It is not refined,” he said, turning the book over in his hands.

“No,” she replied cheerfully. “That’s why it survives being carried in an apron pocket.”

She wiped her hands on the cloth at her hip, leaned slightly closer, and tapped a short piece on the page with her finger. It was one she had been meaning for him to find.

“This one’s my favorite.”

He looked down at it. A short, unadorned piece. Nothing of the classical sort. He read it over once, taking in its simplicity. Then again, more slowly.

“It is… unsophisticated,” he said.

“I never said it wasn’t,” she said laughing.

“But it is not without merit,” he added, almost despite himself.

“There now,” she said warmly. “You’re improving already.”

He set the ballad book down with surprising care.

“You surprise me,” he said, though no condescension could be found in it now. Only recognition.

Her chest warmed strangely at that.

“You shouldn’t let it distress you too much,” she shrugged, though her smile lingered. “The world’s wider than it looks from certain angles.”

“Yes,” he said after a moment, studying her for a moment that ran slightly longer than was polite. “It would seem so.”

She turned back toward her work after that, and he took to the chair once again. But something between them had changed irrevocably, from one shape to another, and neither of them remarked upon it.

He took the chair once again, book open across a knee, one hand resting against the page, thumb hooked back into the crease to keep his place as he read, or doing something near enough to it. His eyes moved across the page at intervals, but they lifted often, drifting toward the counter, toward the window, toward nothing in particular. Once or twice they settled on her for extended periods of time. Following the movement of her hands. The sound of her humming beneath her breath. The way she tucked loose strands of hair back with her wrist when her fingers were sticky with dough.

She gave no sign of noticing.

“You don’t read much of it,” she observed eventually, after watching him do exactly that for the better part of five minutes.

His attention returned to her, drawn back from wherever it had gone.

“I read enough.”

“That’s not the same thing.”

“No,” he said after a pause. “I suppose not.”

“Well?” she said after a moment.

“Well, what?”

“If you’ve brought Homer all the way into my bakery, you may as well make proper use of him.” she said. “Go on—read.”

He blinked at her. A brief, almost imperceptible pause while he registered the suggestion as a serious one.

“I do not make a habit of performing for others,” he said.

“It’s not a performance,” she replied lightly. “There’s no audience to speak of.”

His mouth quirked up slightly, biting back a half-smile. “That is hardly reassuring.”

“You’re a difficult man to please, Mr. Sumner,” she said, laughing softly.

“I had not noticed.”

“You wouldn’t.”

She wiped her hands and came a little nearer from behind the counter, leaning one elbow against it, tipping her chin into her palm. Waiting.

He watched her a moment longer, debating with himself on how to proceed.

“You would not understand most it,” he said at last.

There it was again, that prejudice.

And again she did not bristle, merely let it pass without offense, like water off a duck’s back.

“You may be surprised,” she said, raising her brows a fraction, “what women understand when men stop explaining the world at them.”

His expression flickered with a trace of something that might have been embarrassment. Then, he looked back down at the page with the air of a man making a small concession that costs him very little, “Very well,” he said and began to read:

“Sing, O goddess, the anger of Achilles, son of Peleus,” he began, something intimate in his words despite the formality of the language, “that brought countless ills upon the Achaeans.”

The bakery seemed to quiet itself around it, making space for the sound of him.

“Many a brave soul did it send hurrying down to Hades,” he continued, eyes moving steadily now, “and many a hero did it yield a prey to dogs and vultures…”

She listened less to Homer than to him. To the way he carried the words. The exhaustion beneath the precision. The strange reverence he carried for suffering, even while—she was almost certain—despising it.

“…for so were the counsels of Jove fulfilled,” his voice tapered slightly as he came to a natural pause, “from the day on which the son of Atreus, king of men, and great Achilles, first fell out with one another,” he finished, closing the book halfway.

“Well,” he said, clearing his throat lightly and looking away from her in a manner she suspected he imagined was less obvious than it was. “There it is.”

Was he embarrassed?

“That’s miserable.”

“It is war.”

“That’s what men always say.” She folded her arms loosely. “As though it explains anything.”

“It explains enough.”

“No,” she said, shaking her head lightly. “It explains why men begin. Not why they continue.”

That caught him off guard in a way he wasn’t expecting.

“And what answer would satisfy you?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” she admitted. “But not inevitability. Maybe… why they don’t stop,” she said.

He turned the book in his hands, fingers pressing into the worn leather as though testing its shape.

“It is in men,” he said quietly. “Violence. Ambition. Vanity. Pride. They dress it differently across the centuries, but it remains the same.”

“That sounds like an excuse.”

“It is an observation.”

She met his gaze, unflinching.

“And you believe that?”

He paused for a moment, debating. He could have deflected it, turned it aside and dismissed it. She half-expected him to—he had a talent, nothing overtly rude, for redirecting conversation when it ventured somewhere particular. She had noticed it in the days he had been coming in. He could talk freely enough about the weather, medicine, London society; but ask him anything that required him to account for himself, and he moved like a man who had learned to quietly steer away from certain topics, without appearing to do so.

But this time he did not.

“Yes,” he said.

“You’ve seen it, then—war,” she said.

His expression altered at the word. War. Not by much, not the collapse she might have expected, only enough that she regretted it immediately. He stared down at the page in his hands as though the answers to life—to all his troubles—might be hidden there instead.

“I have seen enough,” he said, grinding his jaw slightly.

That was all he had to say on it. But it was not nothing—something old and dark moved there. Death lived beyond those words, though he would not breathe life into them.

She studied him with an almost sadness in her expression now. Not pitying, never that. There was too much self-possession in her for pity to sit naturally upon her face. But she had been around the docks enough to recognize that particular quality of pain, in the men who came back from the sea with their silences changed. There was a difference between a door that was locked and one that was only closed, and she knew better than to confuse the two.

Instead, she reached for one of her own books, fingers finding it without needing to look.

“Then read this instead,” she said, holding out the little ballad book toward him once more.

He hesitated a second before closing the distance to her, reluctantly taking the book into his hands. Brows lifting slightly, staring at her incredulously, when he saw the page she had marked with her thumb.

“Burns.”

“Aye,” she replied. “But read it proper.”

Something in that—proper—might have been teasing. Might not. His eyes quickly skimmed the lines before he sighed in defeat and began:

“O, my love is like a red, red rose,

That’s newly sprung in June…

O, my love is like the melody,

That’s sweetly played in tune.”

His voice grew more careful as he read, as though even foolishness deserved accuracy. Even if he did not quite believe in it.

She watched him again, rather than the page. The shape of lips around the words. The way his voice gentled despite himself. The way his tongue darted at the corner.

“So fair art thou, my bonnie lass,

So deep in love am I…

And I will love thee still, my dear,

Till a’ the seas gang dry.”

He stopped there, scoffing.

“It is sentimental nonsense,” he declared.

“And yet you read it lovely,” she replied, smiling softly at him.

“That does not improve its argument.”

“You don’t think much of that sort of thing,” she said, tilting her head and studying him.

“No,” he replied. He set the book on the counter with more care than the verdict suggested, and she felt again the slight gap between what he said and what his hands did.

“Why not?”

“Because it is not true,” he kept his eyes on the cover of the book.

She nodded once, slowly, as though she had expected no other answer. “No?”

“No,” he repeated. “Love does not endure beyond its conditions. Love alters. People alter. By circumstance, time, necessity. Affection is… conditional, whether poets care to admit it or not.”

She blinked, before smiling sadly at him. “That’s a very fine way of saying it fades.”

“It does.”

“And you’re certain of that?”

“I have seen no evidence to the contrary.”

She considered him a moment longer before gently taking the little book back from his hands. Their fingers brushed in a quick meeting, leaving a tingle in their wake.

“Perhaps,” she said softly, “you’ve spent too long looking where things break, and not enough in the right places.”

For once, he had no immediate reply. And for the first time since entering Fletcher’s Bakery, he looked not like a man playing pretend, humoring pleasant company… but rather like a man beginning, against all better judgment, to hope she might understand him.

He unconsciously flexed his fingers against his side, in the wake of their brief touch.

“I think I have looked precisely where such things are most likely to appear,” he said.

“And found absolutely nothing worth keeping?”

Outside, the yard bell rang somewhere near the docks. Low and iron-heavy. Marking the hour. The afternoon light had gone flatter still while they spoke. The windows showed only a dull wash of cloud now, the glass faintly fogged at the corners from the heat inside.

“You place a great deal of faith in feeling,” he said after a moment.

“And you place too little.” She laughed softly beneath her breath and shook her head, before turning away to busy herself with tidying a tray that scarcely needed tidying at all. “For a man of such avowed indifference and remarkable distrust in pleasure, you sure do return here with remarkable regularity.”

“It is not pleasure I distrust.”

“No?” She glanced back at him. “What, then?”

“Expectation.”

The answer came too quickly to have been prepared. It surprised him as much as her—she saw it in the slight stillness that followed, the way he looked away.

“You think,” she said slowly, “that if a thing is wanted badly enough, it is bound to be taken away.”

His gaze lifted to her again.

“Is that not the usual order of things?”

She studied him quietly.

“Funny. I never pegged you as a cynic.”

That seemed genuinely to catch him off guard.

“I am not a cynic,” he said after a moment.

“No?”

“No. More of a… realist.”

“And what’s the difference?”

“A realist sees the world as it is.”

“And a cynic?”

“The same thing,” he admitted dryly, “but with less precision.”

She reached for the slim pamphlet at the bottom of the stack, flipping through it, until she found the page she wanted, as she stepped around the counter to stand next to him—not close enough to touch, but nearer all the same.

He watched her approach with a slight wariness.

“Listen.”

Before he could object, she began reading aloud:

“‘O me, O life… of the questions of these recurring, of the endless trains of the faithless, of cities filled with the foolish…’”

Her voice softened as she read, but did not lose conviction.

“‘What good amid these, O me, O life?’”

He listened despite himself.

“‘Answer: that you are here—that life exists and identity, that the powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse.’”

She closed the pamphlet gently, watching him with an expression he could not quite categorise: attentive, warm, something quiet and steady at the back of it.

“…optimistic to the point of naivety,” he said after a moment.

“Is it?” she said. “Or is it merely honest?”

“There is a difference?”

“A very great one,” she said. “Naivety doesn’t know things are terrible. Optimism does. It simply refuses surrender.”

He looked at her for a long moment, a faint crease forming between his brows.

“You believe that strongly.”

“I do.”

“Despite all evidence to the contrary.”

“I think Whitman had seen enough of things to know they were terrible,” she said, “and still thought a man could contribute something. That the play goes on regardless, but that you are in it all the same. That that is not nothing.” She paused. “I think that is a harder thing to believe than despair.”

Sumner was quiet a moment, her answer seemingly holding him. She saw it happen; not agreement, not yet. But attention of a different kind entirely.

Respect, dangerous thing, that.

“And what verse would you contribute?” he asked.

She considered it honestly, without rushing the answer.

“I don’t know yet,” she admitted. “But I think that’s all right. Perhaps the point is the contributing, not the certainty about what it is.”

He turned the pamphlet over in his hands once, then set it back on the counter.

“And you?” she said. “What verse?”

He did not answer immediately. She had half-readied herself for the quiet sidestep of his deflection. But he sat with the question instead.

“I am not sure I have one,” he said, at last.

“No?” she said.

“No.” A pause. “I have only—” he stopped. Began again, differently. “I have been in several places I should not have been, done several things that were in my interest and several that were not, and I cannot always tell which were which in retrospect. I have read a great deal, and have come to few conclusions that held.” He looked back at the Iliad, still there, still open. “Homer seems the most honest to me, in the end: ‘We men are wretched things, and the gods, who have no cares themselves, have woven sorrow into the very pattern of our lives.’ That has not yet proved false.”

She was quiet for a moment, watching him.

“This is the most you’ve told me about yourself since you first walked in here,” she said.

He looked up. Something in his expression shifted into the look of a man who had only just registered how far the door had opened throughout their talk—subconsciously allowing her a glance beyond—and is uncertain whether or not to be alarmed by it.

“So it is,” he said.

“You needn’t look so alarmed,” she said gently. “It’s only conversation.”

“I have not been very good at it lately,” he said.

“You’ll get better,” she said, smiling softly at him.

He held her gaze for a beat. Then, quietly: “The verse,” he said. “I hope you find it.”

She smiled—the full, unselfconscious one, not the quick, polite one she saved for customers.

Before she could reply back, the bell above the door gave a sudden, sharp ring. Too loud for the conversation they had settled into. The intimacy of the moment vanished so quickly it felt imagined.

She straightened instinctively and turned.

“Hester,” she said, the name slipping out before she quite thought it.

The woman in question came in with the confidence of someone who had long since stopped worrying about what others thought of her.

“Well,” Hester said with the faintest lift at the corner of her mouth. Her gaze moved from the baker to Sumner and back again, reading the room with a practiced efficiency. “Aren’t you kept in good company.”

Giving a cough, Sumner took a sideways step, adding more distance. The space between them restored with a swiftness enough to be noticed.

“It’s a shop, same as ever,” she said.

“Aye,” Hester replied pleasantly. “And I’ve eyes, same as ever.”

“Miss,” he said, with a small inclination of his head toward Hester.

Hester looked him over with a slow, unhurried thoroughness that she made no effort to conceal. “Sir,” she said, delicate eyebrow raising, though there was no real deference in it.

He reached for his gloves and coat, tucking his book away, before placing his hat back atop his head and gathering the wrapped parcel in his hands.

“I should not intrude further,” he said, directed—she noticed—more to her than Hester.

“You’re not—” she began.

But he had already stepped back.

“It is a busy establishment,” he added, though it plainly was not, and all three of them knew it.

He moved toward the door. The bell gave its same small, tired ring as he stepped out into the gray. The door closed. And then he was gone and the window showed nothing but the ordinary afternoon going about itself as though nothing of any particular significance had occurred.

She stood at the counter a moment, her hand gripping its edge.

The shop felt different for his absence. Hester was already making herself comfortable and had the look of someone who intended to be there for some time.

“Well,” Hester said, after a beat, folding her arms. “You’ll wear that look into your face if you’re not careful.”

“What look?”

“The one where you forget yourself,” Hester said while smirking.

“I’ve no notion what you mean,” she said and turned back to the work waiting for her hands on the counter. But her eyes flicked to the window more than once.Where the street had already swallowed him whole and left no trace.

The letter had arrived in the morning.

She had read it once, standing at the back table with the ovens already lit and the whole day still ahead of her, and then she had folded it carefully and set it beneath the edge of a tin where it would not be seen, and told herself she would think about it later.

She had not thought about it. She had not stopped thinking about it.

She had meant only to make a small batch of caramel, nothing elaborate, a simple thing she had done a hundred times without thought. Sugar to heat, turned just so, drawn at the right moment.

The first batch caught before she reached it.

She saw it too late; the shift from amber to something darker and wrong, the smell turning sharp and acrid at the edge. She pulled it from the heat, but the damage was done. She set it aside, measured fresh sugar into the pan, and began again.

The second burned at the same point.

She stood over it longer than necessary with the spoon in her hand, watching the slow, ruined pull of it, the thin smoke rising in a pale thread toward the ceiling.

“Damn,” she murmured to herself.

She set the pan aside and pressed her hands flat against eyes. Outside, the dockyard had grown louder in the past days. She could hear it even from within the shop: the steady increase of labor and preparation, the creak of timber under new strain, men called to and fro with increasing urgency. Ships being made ready. The season pressing forward.

She drew a breath. Set the third pan on the heat.

And then—

Too fast, again. The colour turned before she expected it, the moment she had been reaching for coming and going while her attention slipped, and by the time she moved it was already past.

“Come on,” she said, the words half under her breath. “Just—come on, come on—”

Her throat tightened with a suddenness that had nothing at all to do with the sugar, and she knew it, and it made no difference. She pressed the back of her fingers to her mouth and stood very still for a moment, eyes shut.

He had been passing through. They always were, in a port city. He had stayed long enough that she had believed, for a time, that staying was a thing he intended. He had spoken of Berlin the way people speak of places they mean to return to, and she had let herself believe she would be included in that future too. He had been warm, and certain, and full of the world in a way she had not yet encountered in anyone else. And then one morning the ship was in the harbor and he was on it, and all his certainty went with him, and she had been left with a recipe and the distinct impression of having been the last to know.

That she had half-expected it had not made it easier to receive the news of him. That he was gone entirely now, really gone—some battle out in Milan—made the old feeling sit differently in her chest. Not the ache of being left. Something heavier that had not been there before and would, she suspected, take some considerable time to properly account for.

“Stupid,” she said, to the ruined pan, to herself, to no one. “Stupid, stupid—”

The bell above the door rang.

Too early. The shutters were not even up.

“We’re not open,” she called, without turning, her voice rougher than she wanted it. “You’ll have to come back at half past—”

She stopped, lowered her hand, and turned.

He stood just inside the door.

He did not speak. His gaze moved across the room once, taking in the pans set aside, the darkened sugar cooling from within, the air still holding the sharp, bittersweet remnant of three failures. Then it shifted to her.

She straightened at once. “It’s nothing,” she said, too quickly, wiping her face. “A batch gone off. I’ll have it right before opening, there’s still time—”

He crossed the room without answering.

He set his hat on the counter. Shrugged his coat off with the same economy he did everything, folded it over the back of the chair. Rolled his sleeves to the elbow. Then he went to the basin, unhurried, and washed his hands as though it were the most natural thing in the world for him to be doing.

She stared at him. “You needn’t—”

“I know,” he said, drying his hands without looking up.

“You’ve not the first idea how—”

“Probably not,” he agreed.

She opened her mouth, then closed it.

He moved to the worktable, examined the pans briefly before setting the ruined ones to the side without ceremony. Then he reached for the sugar.

She ought to have stopped him. Said something sharper. Put him back on his proper side of the counter, where customers belonged. She did not. Something in the way of him kept her rooted where she stood.

He worked without haste. Not with the ease of long practice but with the careful attention of a man accustomed to doing unfamiliar things correctly. He measured. Watched the heat. Made two small errors in the first minute, which she corrected without comment, adjusting the flame with her own hand, moving the pan slightly.

They did not speak much.

“You’ve it too high,” she said, after a moment. Her voice had steadied somewhat.

“I see it.”

“Do you? Because you’ve not seen it the last three attempts.”

“Those were yours,” he said.

That caught her. “Fair enough…”

She stepped closer, reaching past him to adjust the heat further, her hand closing over his on the handle to still it.

For a moment, neither of them moved.

Then she shifted his grip, brought the flame lower, guided the slow rotation of the pan.

“Gradual,” she said, more quietly now. “You’ve got to let it come on by degrees or it turns on you before you know it’s gone.”

He did not argue. His attention was fixed on the pan, but she was aware of him in a particular way she had not thought before.

“There,” she said. “That’s it.”

He looked at the pan. Then at her.

“Is it corrected?”

“Near enough,” she said. “You can’t undo it entirely. Only bring it back from the edge.”

She realised, a moment too late, that she was not looking at the pan.

He was not, either.

The silence between them held for a moment.

“You’ve got flour,” he said, after a moment.

She frowned, confusion painting across her face. “What?”

“There,” gestured, briefly, toward her face. “Your cheek.”

“Oh—” She reached up with the back of her hand, rubbing at the wrong place entirely.

“Not like that,” he said.

And before she could manage it herself—

He reached out.

It was a small thing, should have been nothing, was nothing. His thumb brushed her cheek once, light and precise, the way he did most things. But he did not hurry it, and she did not move away. For a moment the kitchen held very still around them, the ovens breathing steadily, the sounds of the street coming through the open shutter in their ordinary way, as though nothing of any particular significance were occurring.

“There,” he said. Quieter than before.

Their eyes met, and they found themselves closer than was strictly necessary. Neither of them stepped back.

“Are you sweet on me, Mr. Sumner?” The words came out before she had decided to say them. Light, almost careless in their tone. Almost.

He went still. Did not look at her. Not at once.

She thought he might let it pass. He was capable of it. Had done it a dozen times before when something pressed too close.

Then, very quietly: “You’ll burn the sugar.”

“I see that,” she said, letting out a short laugh.

He said nothing more. And that—the not-answering— was answer enough.

Before long he was gone again. The bell rang sharp in the quiet. The door closed.

She stood for a long moment after.

Looked at the coin on the counter. Looked at the shelf above the worktable, where the edge of folded paper sat tucked beneath the tin, unremarkable and terrible in its stillness. She had known, when she read it, that she would have to carry it through the day the way one carries a heavy stone. She had known there was no other option available to her. The world remained entirely uninterested in accommodating grief with a decent interval. What she had not known was that someone might come in from the street and stay, without being asked to and without making anything of it.

Her feet found the chair in the corner without her directing them there, and she sat, pressing her fingers to her eyes. She told herself it was only for a moment, to take the weight off, to let the tremor in her hands subside before the first customers came. And somewhere between one breath and the next, the weight of the morning caught up with her at last.

HULL, ENGLAND. JUNE 7, 1859.

The shop had been closed for hours.

Outside, Hull carried on in its usual rough fashion: voices raised, the distant swell of drink, tempers rising and falling as the night took hold. Now and then came the sharp crack of laughter from the direction of the taverns, or the hollow clatter of iron-rimmed wheels striking uneven stone. Life persisted stubbornly in the dark.

But held within a quieter pocket of time, the bakery sat apart from it all.

A storm had broken over the town earlier in the day. Rainwater still clung in the shallow black seams between the cobbles outside. The air beyond the windows glowed faintly yellow beneath the gas lamps lining Clifford Street, their light softened by the mist creeping in from the Humber.

Inside, the ovens had been banked low. They no longer roared, but breathed a slow, steady heat that had settled deep into the bones of the place. It made the bakery feel lived-in, even amongst the stillness. A single lamp burned low on the counter, its dim glow catching the fine drift of flour that hung suspended in the air, and managed to cling to everything—shelves, aprons, skin, even the worn boards beneath her feet.

She had stayed later than usual.

There had been no real reason for it. The day’s baking was done. Tomorrow’s dough prepared and resting. Shutters drawn. Accounts squared near enough. And yet she lingered, moving slower than she needed to, hands idle setting things that required no setting. Straightening what was already straight. Wiping what was already clean.

Waiting, though she could not have said for what.

It’s not like she was expecting anyone.

She let out a breath and reached for the scrap pail beside the worktable.

“Well,” she murmured to herself, “can’t stand here all night looking foolish.”

The back door stuck slightly from the damp when she pushed it open into the back alley, half-swallowed in shadow. It ran narrow between the bakery and the adjoining houses and shops, opening farther down toward the timber yard and docks where the silhouettes of masts stood black against the sky.

She heard the dull iron note of the Queen’s Dock yard bell tolling the midnight hour. A dog answered with a mournful howl from farther down the lane.

She stepped out carefully with the pail balanced against her hip.

And stopped.

There, standing several paces off in the dark, she saw the vague shape of a man.

For one sharp instant her pulse jumped.

Then the figure shifted slightly beneath the dim light and resolved into something familiar—the broad dark coat rumpled at the edges, the bowler hat tipped low, the particular stillness of him.

“—Lord above—”

The words left her before she could temper them.

“Mr. Sumner?”

He stood turned half away from her, his attention fixed not upon the bakery but farther down the alley itself, toward some pocket of deeper shadow between the alley walls. As though he had heard something there. Or expected some monster to pop out of its darkness.

“What are you doing out here?” she asked, bewilderment overtaking alarm. “You’ve lost your way entirely if you’ve come round the back.”

No answer. Or none that matched the question.

When he finally looked toward her, it happened as if he were returning from somewhere very far off. His gaze taking a second to settle into focus. His pupils looked dark and blown wide in the low light. But when his eyes fixed on her, it was as though he had come upon something unexpected… something worth considering.

“I did not mean to disturb you.”

“You were not going to knock?”

“I had not decided.”

That made her laugh softly despite herself.

“Hopeless creature,” she muttered. “Come inside before you take cold entirely.”

He did not move.

Only continued watching her with that same unnervingly intent gaze.

She shifted the scrap pail to her other hand, studying him more carefully now. There lingered the unmistakable scent of spirits, along with an oddness to him tonight. His attention fixed too hard when it landed. His movements a touch delayed.

She stepped closer, and without thinking, caught hold of his hand.

Cold.

Truly cold.

“Oh, your hands are freezing.” Her brow pinched at once. “Standing out here in wet weather… You’ll have yourself laid up before the night is done—have you no sense at all?”

She pulled him in after her before he could object.

He obeyed easily.

The warmth of the bakery met them at once upon entering, softening the damp chill clinging to him. She shut the door firmly against the alley and set the scrap pail aside with a clatter.

“There,” she said briskly. “Better already.”

The room seemed smaller suddenly with him inside it at such a late hour. More intimate.

The low lamp cast amber light across the planes of his face, catching the faint roughness along his jaw and the tired shadows beneath his eyes. He looked worn tonight.

“There’s still heat left in the bricks.” She took

She drew him nearer toward the ovens.

“Fire’s near gone, but it’s better than out there.” She took both his hands between hers again, rubbing warmth back into them. “Honestly, you’d let yourself perish from stubbornness if nobody stopped you.”

He nodded absentmindedly, though he had not been listening. His attention remained fixed elsewhere with solemn concentration.

Her.

The dark ribbon loosened halfway from her hair. The way the low light of the lamp illuminated parts of her face. The movement of her mouth as she spoke, the way her lips wrapped around the consonants and syllables, though he could not make out the words. The warmth of her hands—the contrast to his own.

“You’re so warm,” he said suddenly.

It came out quieter than he had meant it to. Almost as if it were a thought he had not intended to share out loud.

Her hands stilled only for a moment.

“Well, I should hope so,” she said, attempting at lightness and not quite finding it. “I’ve been standing over these ovens since before dawn.”

She squeezed his hands once more before letting go to set a kettle on the coals.

“A little something hot will do you more good than whatever you’ve been at,” she added, not looking at him now. “You reek of it.”

He gave the smallest hint of a smile at that.

“Do I?”

“You do.”

A pause.

“You always do, a little. But tonight—” she exhaled sharply through her nose, biting back a laugh. “You are a difficult man, Mr. Sumner.”

“I have been told so.”

She shook her head once, dismissing the topic. “Sit, if you’ve the sense for it.”

He did not sit. Instead, he remained where he was, his attention fixed on her hands as she moved. The flour still caught in the creases of her skin. The way she brushed it absently against her apron, only to gather more.

She poured what remained of the warmed milk into two little cups, adding a little spice. When she handed one to him, his fingers brushed hers deliberately, lingering a touch too long to be accidental.

“You’ve been absent all day,” she said after a moment, scratching lightly at her cheek, unknowingly spreading a fine dusting of flour across.

“I have been occupied.”

“Mm.”

She leaned back against a counter, head tilted slightly, studying him with that same open, unguarded expression that had unsettled him since the first day he stepped foot into the shop. It had always been the thing he could not account for.

“I thought perhaps you’d decided you no longer cared for the bread,” she added.

“I never cared for it,” he said, almost reflexively.

Her mouth curved. “You might have spared yourself the trouble of coming, then.”

“I considered it.”

“And yet…”

“And yet—” he had come. Again, and again, and again. He did not finish it in words. He did not need to.

“You are in a strange humour tonight.”

“I am not in humour at all.”

“No? Then perhaps you are only strange.”

A quick flash of amusement flickered across his face.

She looked over his form—the unsteady stillness, the way he held himself as if by effort, the faint sheen of distance in his eyes. There was an unguarded aura about him tonight. A carelessness—no—something less… arranged. Brought on by the late hour, perhaps. Or the knowledge of departure pressing at the edges of things.

“You’ll be gone tomorrow,” she said, quieter now.

“Yes.” He said it plainly, with no attempt at reassurance. Just yes. And somehow that made it worse.

“And that’s all you’ve to say on it?”

“What would you have me say.”

She traced idle circles against the warm side of her cup, a smile touching briefly at the corners of her mouth.

“Oh, I don’t know. Something finer, perhaps. Something that might make a better story of it.”

“I am not in the habit of improving things for the sake of how they sound.”

“I’ve noticed,” she said, a little dry. “Well, I suppose I shall miss you.”

He placed his cup down, untouched. He seemed, for a moment, not to know what to do with her revelation. Which, more than anything, made her soften as she continued staring at him.

“Why?”

She blinked at him.

“Why?”

“Yes.”

The sincerity of it nearly made her laugh.

“Because you appear here every day and say very little and pretend not to enjoy yourself.”

“I do not enjoy myself.”

“No,” she agreed lightly. “But you come all the same and somehow make—me—the room feel… different for it.”

“That is not a reason.”

“It is the only one you are getting.”

Silence settled again. The oven ticked softly behind them, heat pressing close, turning the air thick. She became aware of the flour still dusted along her forearms, the loosened tie of her apron, the lateness of the hour in a way she had not, until now.

He had not looked away from her.

“I have observed,” he said at last, voice low and measured, “that you are… industrious.”

She blinked. “Industrious.”

“You rise before light, and work until well past it. You engage with a great many people of little consequence, and yet you maintain—” he paused, searching for the word, “—a composure that suggests you are… unusually content with it.”

That startled a smile from her.

“You have been studying me, then.”

“You work incessantly.”

“So do half the women in Hull.”

“Yes,” he said, studying her, “though most do not sing and recite poetry whilst doing it.”

She felt her ears heating up faintly beneath his attention.

“That is hardly a crime.”

“I did not say it was.”

“Well,” she said, unable to help it, “I am glad my work has proven so… philosophically stimulating.”

“There is nothing philosophical in it.”

“No?”

“No. It is a matter of fact.”

She shook her head, trying to bite back her smile, and failing. “And what fact is that?”

“That you are ill-suited to the life you are living.”

That caught her off-guard.

She set her cup aside slowly. “I beg your pardon?”

“You are confined by it,” he went on, tone unchanged. “Your circumstances. Your trade. It is… limiting.”

There it was—that bluntness, that careless disregard for the weight of his own words.

She stared at him a moment, then barked a laugh outright. Bright, full, unabashed, and in his face.

“Oh, that is a terrible thing to say to a woman—is that meant to be a compliment?”

“It is an observation.”

“No, I daresay it is an insult,” she corrected, still laughing, though there was a sharper edge beneath it now. “And a poorly delivered one at that.”

A faint crease formed between his brows.

“You make sport of me.”

“You make it very easy.”

He exhaled slowly, eyes never leaving hers.

“I did not mean it as an insult,” he said. “I meant—” another pause, longer this time, as though the thought resisted him, “—that I have found myself… reluctant to leave.”

The laughter faded.

“That is a rather different statement altogether.”

“Yes.”

“And you could not have begun with that?”

“I am not practiced in such things.”

“No,” she said softly. “I do not suppose you are.”

Another silence, but this one shifted—something unspoken pressing between them.

“There are objections,” he said at last. “You should not have… encouraged this.”

Her brow lifted faintly. “Encouraged what, exactly?”

“This—” He gestured at the space between them.

A small, almost incredulous breath left her.

“This?” she echoed. “You’ll have to be more particular, Mr. Sumner, I’ve not the gift of—”

“This familiarity” he interrupted her, furrowing his brows, as if the word itself did not suit what he meant. “Your… attentions—”

She laughed, soft and surprised. “My attentions?”

“They are misplaced.”

His words were clipped, awkward, blunt, and almost clinical in their delivery. He did not soften them. Did not dress them up. Simply laid it between them like something that might be examined and then set aside.

“You ought not encourage men without prospects.”

“And are you such a man?”

“Yes.”

The answer came too quickly to doubt.

“You’ve a shop to run,” he continued, quieter now. “And I am… temporary. Not a man accustomed to… reciprocation in the manner you seem to expect. Nor one suited to them. My circumstances, my profession, my… history—render such considerations impractical.”

“Impractical,” she echoed him again, faintly amused, all while leaning back against the counter. “I do not seem to recall asking anything of you.”

“No, you did not need to. That is precisely the difficulty,” he said, meeting her eyes fully, with none of the distance that usually sat behind it. “Your openness, it invites… misinterpretation where it is unwise.”

The words should have landed harder than they did. His voice remained level, but there was strain beneath it now. He stood before her like a man arguing himself into retreat even while remaining exactly where he was.

“Does it?”

“It does.” A beat. “And I have not discouraged it as I ought.”

That, at least, was honest.

“You’ve done a fair job of discouraging most things, in my experience.” Her smile widened.

“This is not most things.”

“No,” she said softly. “It isn’t.”

He drew a breath, as if bracing himself against something far less tangible than her.

“And beyond that,” he continued, more firmly now, as if the argument strengthened the longer he held it, “there is the matter of—of propriety. You are—”

He stopped, not so much as searching for the word, but rather deciding whether to use it at all.

She arched a brow. “I am…?”

“—unsuitable.”

Much as she tried to maintain her composure amongst his posturing, she laughed. Again. Couldn’t help it. It broke clean through the careful structure of his speech, bright and unrestrained and entirely at odds with the solemnity of his words.

He went rigid.

“Oh, that is poorly done,” she said, shaking her head, pressing the backs of her fingers to her lips as if to contain the rest of it. “Truly. You had it near enough—grave and severe and entirely convinced of yourself—and then you lost your footing.”

“I am not attempting to entertain you.”

“No,” she said, still smiling. “You’re attempting to propose, I think. Or something very like it.”

“I am doing no such thing.”

“You are.”

“I am not.”

“You absolutely are.” She pushed off the counter, crossing toward him with an easy confidence that seemed only to unsettle him further. “You’ve come here, on the night before you are to leave, to inform me that despite my obvious deficiencies—my station, my trade, my general unsuitability—you find yourself unaccountably attached.”

His jaw tightened.

“And that this attachment,” she went on, softer now but no less amused, “has been formed against your better judgment. Quite against it, in fact.”

“That is not—”

“It is,” she said gently. “And it’s very noble of you, I’m sure.”

“This is not a matter for mockery.”

“I’m not mocking,” she said, though there was laughter still threaded through her voice. “I’m—what is the word—delighted, perhaps. You’ve made such a production of resisting the obvious.”

“The obvious,” he repeated.

“That you are sweet on me, Mr. Sumner.”

The silence that followed was full of all the things he would not say plainly.

“I will not be made a fool of,” he said at last.

“You aren’t,” she replied, the softness returning, settling into something steadier now. “You’re only a little late to your own understanding…”

“I’ll miss you,” she said it again after a moment, though the words landed differently this time—said with a tenderness he was unused to, making his heart ache.

His eyes dropped briefly to her mouth before lifting again.

The room felt very warm suddenly.

“I think,” he said, voice slowing, lowering in pitch, “that you would do better to direct your inclinations elsewhere.”

She stepped closer, close enough now that he did not need to reach out to touch her, though he had not yet done so. The space between them closed in increments, narrowed to almost nothing now.

“And if I won’t take the advice?”

“You would do better to forget me.”

“I won’t do that either.”

The honesty of her caught him off guard, a faint breath of frustration and incredulity leaving him.

“You persist,” he said.

And yet, he did not step back. That, more than anything, felt like an answer, emboldening her to continue pressing forward.

“I do.”

Her hand rose up the front of his coat, then higher, fingers catching briefly to brush at the edge of his collar, where a trace of flour had transferred from some earlier, unnoticed contact. The gesture was small. Almost domestic. The sort of thing done without thought.

He went still beneath it.

“You’ve spent a whole month pretending not to like me,” she said softly. “I thought I might allow you one imperfect speech in return.”

Her fingers lingered a moment longer than necessary. Then, just as easily, she let them fall.

“It was not imperfect.”

“It was dreadful.”

His mouth twitched into almost a smile, if one were inclined to be generous. He looked at her then as if seeing her properly for the first time—not the surface of her, not the easy brightness, but the steadiness beneath it. The choice in it.

“You should not have laughed,” he murmured, though there was no real reproach in it now.

“I couldn’t help it.”

“You rarely do.”

“Would you prefer I did?”

“No.”

His hand lifted slowly, as if wading through water, fingers brushing a faint line of flour off her cheek before settling there.

She felt the contact like a spark.

“So very warm,” he said, almost absently.

Her eyes closed at the touch, a soft “mm” slipping past her lips as she nuzzled her cheek further into his palm.

His other hand came up, just as slow, just as deliberate, touching her other cheek as though confirming she was there at all. His thumb dragged lightly along her skin, catching on the corner of her mouth.

She exhaled, unsteady.

“You sure take your time.”

“Yes.”

“Is that the drink?”

“Yes.”

“Or just you.”

A pause—

“Both.”

She laughed under her breath, but it faltered when he leaned in with that same inexorable slowness he’d displayed since showing up at her doorstep. Giving her every opportunity to refuse him and pull away.

She did not.

The kiss, when it came, was slower than she expected. It was the natural end of something that had been building longer than either of them had named.

Warmth, first. Then pressure.

He kissed her like a man unaccustomed to tenderness but hungry for it all the same. As though he was testing the reality of it, learning the shape of her mouth against his, savoring the warmth of her breath between each slow press of his lips against hers.

He tasted of alcohol—rum—laced faintly with some bitter, medicinal tincture beneath—Laudanum, though she did not know it by name—but it did not lessen the focus of his attention. If anything, it sharpened it, narrowing the world to the space between them.

She answered him easily and in kind; though where he held, she yielded; where he hesitated, she drew him on just enough to bridge it. Her hands found their way to him without thinking, as though they had known the path all along. The roughness of his coat beneath her palms, her fingers curling into the fabric, drawing him ever closer, before moving higher, brushing the faint stubble along the line of his jaw.

He answered with a whine high in his throat that seemed almost startled from him.

Flour brushed between them as she shifted, her apron catching against him. She felt the heat of him through the layers, the steadiness of his hands as they moved. His touch remained careful, with a precision that betrayed the surgeon in him even now—down her arms, along her waist, tracing, mapping, committing every dip and contour to memory.

“You are very certain,” she murmured against his mouth.

“No.”

“No?”

“No.”

That made her laugh quietly into the next kiss.

Time stretched. The small room seemed to fold in on itself, the warmth of the ovens pressing close, the scent of bread and sugar thick in the air.

He drew back only slightly, forehead resting against hers.

“This is ill-advised,” he said, though his hand had not moved from her, it remained on her hip, thumb brushing absentmindedly back and forth.

“Terribly,” she agreed, licking her lips.

“And yet…”

“And yet.”

A ghost of that earlier humor returned briefly.

“You’ll go tomorrow,” she said quietly.

“Yes.”

“And there’ll be no letters to expect?”

“No.”

She nodded, accepting it with the same strange openness that had undone him from the start.

“Well, then you’d best remember me properly,” she added lightly, that familiar brightness threading through her voice.

“I will,” he replied. His gaze held hers, dark and full of intent.

She gave him a soft, sad smile at that. Her fingers tracing along his sleeves, then higher, to wrap around the tops of his shoulders.

“Don’t forget me… please,” she said, barely above a whisper.

A pause.

“Alright.”

It was the closest thing to a promise he could offer.

He bent his head again, not in argument, but in quiet concession. Whatever came after, he would not name.

Outside, the mist thinned.

Clouds broke in slow seams overhead, and through it the moon showed—pale gold, not yet full, but near enough to cast its light cleanly across the roofs and the dock beyond.

By morning, he would be gone.

But not yet. Not yet.

Tonight, for a few more borrowed hours, he was hers.

And that, to her, was everything.

ZOOLOGISCHER GARTEN, BERLIN, GERMANY. MAY 2, 1861.

He had woken knowing the date.

He could not have said why it should matter. Two years was not a significant amount by any measure—not an anniversary of anything he had the right to call his own. He had spent a single month in Hull in the spring of 1859 before boarding a ship that subsequently sank, leaving him stranded in the Arctic. Whatever had occurred during that month was not the kind of thing that warranted much weight attached to it.

And yet.

He had woken knowing it, and had not been able to forget it. Eventually he rose, dressed, and went out walking in the way he did when the thinking became more trouble than it was worth.

Berlin did not mind. That was something he had noticed about the city in the months since he had arrived. Here, he was not anything in particular at all. He had found that comforting in a way he had not expected.

He had come to the Zoologischer Garten because it was there, and the afternoon was clear, and he had nothing better to do.

He had not been prepared for the bear.

He had stood before that enclosure longer than he intended. The bear had regarded him with the flat, extinguished patience of something that had been powerful in another life and retained only the shape of it. In that moment, standing there, he felt the uncomfortable recognition of looking at something he had hoped he no longer resembled.

That was when the sound reached him.

Small. Unguarded. Something between protest and delight, the kind of sound that belonged entirely to a creature that had not yet learned to moderate itself for the benefit of others.

He turned without thinking much on it.

There was a woman some yards off near a railing, standing with her back to him, with a child settled on her hip with the easy authority of a long habit. The afternoon light fell across them both at an angle that caught the railing’s ironwork and broke into narrow shadows at their feet.

He noted all of this in the way he noted most things—without attaching any particular significance to it.

Then he found he could not look away.

There was nothing unusual about the woman, nothing that should have delayed his attention. She was turned from him. The child was occupied with something at her collar. The scene was entirely ordinary.

And yet he was still looking at it.

He looked more carefully.

It was not that she looked like someone he knew. It was that she moved like someone he had known.

May 2, 1859. The first morning he found himself in her bakery. He stood in Berlin two years to the day from that morning.

The memory arrived without permission. He had trained himself not to think on that time, in the same way he had trained himself not to reach for the laudanum, understanding that both were habits of avoidance dressed as comfort. But this one came of its own accord, unbidden and entirely precise: flour on her cheek, the smell of the bakery pressing in from all sides, the ovens already lit and the morning just beginning, and a woman who had not looked up immediately because she had already known, by some quality of his step or the sound of the latch, exactly who it was.

The child suddenly moved.

Pushing outward instead, small body leaning away from her with the exploratory confidence of something that had never yet encountered a boundary. She adjusted her hold, settling her palm against the child’s back, drawing it in instinctively.

The movement turned the child’s face into the light. And turned her, slightly, with it.

Her profile became clear to him at once and he had enough time to understand what he was looking at.

It was her.

Not the preserved image of her he carried, which had dimmed and blurred at the edges in the way such things did with time. But her, as she actually was. Altered in the way of someone who had continued living in the meantime.

His heart gave a painful lurch within his chest. And that was when his eyes drifted toward the child.

Who was already looking back at him with the direct, unafraid regard of someone who had not yet learned that strangers warranted caution. A brow. A mouth. A face he recognised with a precision that removed any remaining possibility of dismissal.

He had, on occasion, wished he were a less observant man. He had never wished it as sharply as he did at this moment.

He looked at her again.

She had turned fully now. While he had been busy inspecting the child, it seemed she had been aware of him for some time.

She looked at him, and he looked at her.

The distance between them was perhaps twenty yards. It was not a large distance. He was aware of it with an accuracy that had nothing to do with measurement.

He had come to the Zoologischer Garten because it was there, and the date had been sitting on him since before dawn, and he had not known what else to do with it. He had told her, once, that he did not think he had a verse to contribute. He had not known, at the time, what he was saying.

The child lifted one small hand and reached toward him.

And he took a step.

The child’s hand stayed open.

He had been in several places he should not have been. He had done several things that were in his interest and several that were not. He had read a great deal. He had arrived at very few conclusions that held.

This, he thought, looking at her while a child reached toward him with a hand he recognized—

This he could not argue with.

He took another step.