Page 69 of The Baker’s Shadow

We make our way downstairs together, and the bakery kitchen feels different now. Not haunted by Dan’s memory or heavy with my grief. Just a kitchen. A place where we work. A place where we’ll teach our daughter to bake someday, to knead dough and shape loaves and pour love into flour and water and yeast.

Malak makes eggs that are simultaneously overcooked and somehow still runny, and toast that’s black on one side and pale on the other. We sit at the small table and eat anyway, because we’re starving and it doesn’t matter that the food is terrible when we’re eating it together.

“When the baby comes,” I say around a mouthful of rubbery egg, “we need to figure out childcare. I can’t run the bakery and watch an infant at the same time.”

“I can watch her while you work.”

“And who’s going to help me with the baking? You’re getting good at it. I need you in the kitchen.”

He considers this. “We could hire someone. One of the teenagers, maybe. Emma Rodriguez has been asking about a job.”

“The one with the vertical pupils?”

“She’s responsible. And she already knows what we are. That makes things easier.”

“True.” I push my eggs around my plate. “It’s strange, isn’t it? Planning for the future. I haven’t done that in years.”

“Neither have I.” Malak’s hand finds mine across the table. “But I want to. I want to think about next month and next year and ten years from now. I want to imagine our daughter learning to bake. Starting school. Growing up in this town that’s weird and magical and safe.”

“Safe because of you.”

“Safe because of us.” He squeezes my hand. “You rebuilt the barrier too. Your magic is woven into it now, just like mine. This town is ours to protect. Together.”

The word settles into my chest like an anchor. Together. Not alone. Not carrying everything by myself or watching him carry it by himself. Together.

“I like the sound of that,” I tell him.

“So do I.”

We finish our terrible breakfast and clean up the kitchen, moving around each other with the ease of people who’ve learned each other’s rhythms. Outside, I can hear Main Street coming back to life. Car doors slamming. People calling to each other. The normal sounds of a Wednesday morning in Deception Point.

Tomorrow, we’ll reopen the bakery. We’ll face the customers and their questions and probably a few journalists who want to know about the “sinkhole.” We’ll smile and deflect and keep our secrets like we always have.

But today, we rest.

Today, we’re just Malak and Kaia, sitting in a kitchen that smells like burnt toast and new beginnings, planning a future we never thought we’d have.

And that’s enough.

More than enough.

It’s everything.

EPILOGUE

Kaia

The morning light comes through the bakery windows at a slant, catching the flour dust in the air and turning it golden. I shift my daughter higher on my hip and watch Malak’s hands work the dough, his movements careful and deliberate.

“You’re getting better at that,” I tell him.

He glances up, and there’s the smallest hint of a smile at the corner of his mouth. “Only took me six months.”

“Six months and approximately four hundred ruined batches.”

“I wasn’t counting.”

“I was. Mrs. Chen asked if we were planning to open a pottery studio with all the bread-shaped bricks we were producing.”