Page 51 of Once Upon A Small Town Secret
I back away from the oven and sit heavily on the stool by the prep table, forcing steady breaths. Maybe it’s just exhaustion. We’ve been at this since morning, scrubbing and polishing and lifting and rearranging. My body isn’t used to standing this long, not yet.
That’s on top of weeks of nonstop work to get Sweet Confessions ready for the opening in a couple of weeks. All I need now are a few more pieces of furniture and the sign.
Still—the nausea lingers. Not sharp, not overwhelming. Just… there. Rolling my stomach occasionally.
I rub the heel of my hand over my chest and look around the kitchen. The gleaming appliances, the stacked pans, the neatshelves. This is supposed to be joy. This is supposed to be the first page of the new story I’ve been aching to write.
The timer dings.
I push to my feet, a little slower than usual, and open the oven. Steam rushes out, fragrant and hot, and the nausea surges with it. My mouth waters—not with hunger, but with the awful anticipation of being sick.
I grit my teeth and slide the tray onto the rack. The rolls shine, perfect and golden, sugar melting into dark stripes. They look exactly the way I wanted them to.
And yet, when I lean down to inhale, my stomach flips again.
I stagger back, hand gripping the edge of the counter.
What the hell?
I’ve been baking since I was a kid. I’ve been elbow-deep in buckets of cinnamon, clouds of flour, vats of buttercream. My whole life smells like this, tastes like this. And never, not once, have I felt nauseated from it.
I sink onto the stool again, eyes on the rolls cooling on the rack. They’re gorgeous. They’re the kind of rolls I promised my family, the kind of rolls that should christen this kitchen. But my body recoils at the thought of biting into one.
Something inside me curls tight, uneasy.
I rest my head in my hands and breathe slowly.
It could be nothing. It could be the heat, or the fact that I skipped lunch, or the leftover exhaustion from weeks of pushing my body harder than I should.
But the doubt lingers.
And beneath it, something I don’t want to name.
I close my eyes and continue to take deep breaths, the thought sinking into my mind like claws.
Something is different.
Something is changing.
And I don’t know yet what it means.
Chapter Twenty
Ben
The bar is quiet in a way that only happens after a loud night. I sent everybody home right after closing and said I’d clean up. No one argued. Everyone’s beat. Fridays have been a grind lately—good for revenue, hell on my head.
I move through the tables with a damp rag and the bottle of sanitizer, muscle memory doing the work while my brain drifts. Chairs up on the patio first, then the high-tops, then the booths.
Wipe down, collect the errant coasters. Fans buzzing overhead, dishwasher rumbling in the kitchen over the final load of dishes. I like it like this. The place is relieved, and so am I.
Except tonight.
Tonight, I’m annoyed, but not at anything I can point to. The irritation tingles under the skin like a low-grade fever. I tell myself it’s the day—that customer who wanted to sample six IPAs and bought one half-pint, the coil that jammed in the walk-in, the shipment that showed up with one box short.
But I know better.
The real reason is twenty steps away behind the brick wall to my left, in a kitchen I can picture too well, with ovens that now heat like a dream because we put the damn infrastructure in right.
