Page 30 of Resisting the Grump

Her brows lifted. “Oh? Where’s that?”

“Paris.”

The pink of her cheeks deepened. “My boss is in Paris right now.”

“Your best boss?”

She nodded. “I only stuttered the other day because she’s my best friend, too.”

“I get it. I have a best boss, too. Technically, he’s supposed to work for me, but it doesn’t often feel that way.”

“Interesting.” She leaned back in her chair, studying me for a moment as her collarbone rose and fell with her breath. “Mind if I ask how you got into the fault-finding business?”

“That’s not exactly the business I’m in,” I said, feigning a scowl to let her know I wasn’t crazy about that diagnosis. “But it happened… organically.”

She cocked her head.

“My dad’s a chef and my mom was an English teacher, so restaurants and words have always been a big part of my life.”

“So you enjoy what you do?”

“The perks are second to none,” I admitted, “but I’d like to start branching out a bit more.”

“Hence your surprising appearance at the Star Baker Festival?”

“Exactly,” I said, pouring two glasses of water from the carafe at the edge of the table. “Apparently, being a jerk isn’t as à la mode as it used to be.”

Her laugh rang out like a bright bell. “Good to know.”

“What about you?” I asked. “Did you always dream of spending your days shaping other people’s buns?”

She shook her head. “No. I thought I wanted to be a lawyer.”

“So you could put buns behind bars?”

“Not quite.” She ran a hand through her shiny hair. “I started working as a paralegal in a family law firm and realized all the people working there were as miserable as the clients they were dealing with all day.”

“And you figured life’s too short.”

“Pretty much,” she said with a shrug. “So I dropped out of law school, asked Grace if I could help out in the bakery, and haven’t looked back. I’ll probably never be wealthy, but I’m time rich, and isn’t that why people work their butts off anyway?”

“I suppose so.”

“I mean, I know there are other reasons to be ambitious, but I didn’t like who I was becoming as a result of doing that job.”

“How so?”

She sighed. “I just felt like I was turning into a capitalist sheep. I had nothing to brag about except for how busy I was and how little sleep I was getting. And the only thing I had time to do with the money I was earning was shop online for stuff I didn’t need to impress people I didn’t really care about. It was such an unfulfilling hamster wheel, and… I don’t know. The price of choosing that life felt too high for what I was getting.”

“I admire that. It couldn’t have been easy to make that decision.”

“It wasn’t,” she said. “But as soon as I made it, I felt so much lighter. Until I told my parents, but they’ve come around. They can see I’m much happier now. Healthier. Less negative.”

“It says a lot about you that you chose your happiness over your profession.”

“Maybe,” she said. “Or maybe it’s easy to make a change when your comfort zone isn’t comfortable anymore.”

“Either way, I think you did the right thing.”

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