Page 111 of Rise
Maybe she should go back to Boston. Back to the place where ambition had once lit her up from the inside out, where the pace was brutal but familiar, where the hours were long but at least they made sense. Maybe she should return to the version of herself who knew how to disappear into a kitchen and emerge with something immaculate and sharp.
Maybe she should shut the door on this place before someone else did it for her.
Before the bakery lost its warmth. Before Beck decided it was too much. Before the people here, kind and well-meaning, realized that Hazel wasn’t who they thought she was. That she wasn’t made of hometown comfort or quiet resilience. That she wasn’t anyone’s safe place, not really.
She could sell the house and start fresh. Buy something small and new, without chipped trim or slanted floors or memories pressed into every square inch of wall. She could make positive changes, set boundaries, choose rest over ritual. She could live in a neighborhood where no one knew her past, where the shadows didn’t call her by name.
She could make it work.
She always did.
Maybe staying in Bar Harbor wasn’t the solution after all. Maybe it never had been. Maybe it was just the only door left open when everything else fell apart, a soft landing that had started to feel more like a holding pattern.
A dream she’d mistaken fora destination.
Because now, even the bakery didn’t feel like sanctuary. It felt like a place where her job was to put on a performance, like she was holding her breath between each interaction, willing herself to stay kind, stay calm, stay warm, when all she really wanted was to lie down in the flour-dusted quiet and vanish.
She blinked, and her eyes found the smudged windowpane, the faint outline of her reflection barely visible in the darkness of the morning. She didn’t look like someone with answers. She looked like someone who’d wandered too far into something and had forgotten the way back out.
And maybe that was what scared her most.
Not the leaving, never the leaving. That part was easy— she’d seen it practiced before her, all her life. She’d had a front row seat.
But thestaying?That, she didn’t know how to do.
17
Hazel’s thumbs hovered above the screen, the blue-white light of it casting her face in quiet, flickering shadow. She didn’t move for a long time. The words had been there in her head for hours, soft-edged and uncertain, and when she finally began to type them out, it felt like trudging through knee-deep snow, slow and clumsy. Every letter demanded more effort than it should have. Every sentence settled on the screen with a weight that wasn’t proportionate to its length.
Hey, I just wanted to reach out and say that I’m sorry. I don’t like how I ended that call between us. I really shouldn’t have lashed out like that. I hope you all have a good Christmas.
She read it once, then again. The second time was slower, as if clarity might come with repetition. On the third pass, she found herself obsessing over a single word, swappinggoodforgreat,then back again, like the difference might soften the ache beneath it all. But it still sounded too careful, too practiced, like something written by someone trying to prove they were fine, when every part of them wanted to confess that they weren’t. It was a message dressed up in good manners and seasonal civility, a clean line drawn where the real things— regret, distance, and longing— had no room to breathe.
Shedidn’t know what she wanted from it. His forgiveness? His approval? Just a reply, maybe, or proof that he still thought of her as more than a wayward daughter with too many sharp edges. Or maybe it wasn’t about him at all. Maybe it was just a ritual, something her fingers did to keep from shaking. A familiar wound reopened, not to bleed, but to make sure the scar was still there.
She didn’t hit send.
The screen dimmed in her palm then slipped into black. Hazel let her hand fall to her lap as she sat behind the counter, the bakery half-dark and silent around her. The front lights were off, the shadows long and cool across the floors. They’d closed half an hour ago and Juno had slipped out to pick up a delivery at the post office a few blocks away.
Everything still smelled faintly of cinnamon and clove, with just the softest trace of orange— residue from the morning’s loaves still clinging to the air like ghosts too polite to leave. Her wrist throbbed with a dull echo from the burn she’d earned earlier that day, but the pain barely registered. It was quiet now.Tooquiet. And the ache had settled elsewhere— deeper, heavier, somewhere even her breath didn’t quite reach.
She’d been trying,reallytrying, to hold it all together. She’d been trying to prove that grief and flour could be mixed into something worth keeping, that warmth and ritual and fresh bread at sunrise could be enough to hold back the rest of it. But the day had cracked something open inside her again. It was a slow splintering that felt like trying to balance a whole life on a threadbare breath. Too much, too close to breaking. She was unsettled, a moment away from giving into her worst fears— that she wasn’t just the kind of person people left, but also the kind of person who left, too, because that was all she had ever known.
The door swung open before she could spiral further and Juno burst in like a gust of mid-December wind— bright, breathless, and wrapped in that bright green coat of hers with the mismatched buttons. Her cheeks were flushed pink from the cold, her arms full of stacked cardboard boxes, the top one teetering at a dangerous angle.
“You’ve gotta stop making that maple scone,” she said, pushing the door shut with her hip, as if the thoughts had been pouring through her mind from the moment she’d left, and finally,finally,she could let them free. Here, where someone understood. “Some guy came in earlier and bought five and then made me list all the ingredients because his girlfriend’s gluten-free and he wants to impress her, but like— I’m not totally convinced he evenknewwhat glutenwas—“
Hazel didn’t say anything.
Juno kept going, oblivious to the silence. She deposited the boxes on the back counter, huffed out a sigh, and unwound her scarf like someone decompressing from a twelve-act play. “Also, someone from that new B&B near the ferry terminal stopped in. They wanted to know if you do bulk platters for groups? I said I’d ask. Sounds pretty cool, if you ask me. We just need to get the branding squared away. Oh! And someone left this weird little drawing by the register? It looks like a llama, or maybe a sheep, but with angry eyebrows?”
Hazel didn’t smile, she didn’t even pretend to.
“Also,also,”Juno continued,stillundeterred by the silence. “I was thinking we could run a poll on the bakery’s Instagram. Like, favourite holiday treat? Gingerbread versus peppermint bark? Or maybe something quirky, like those spiced almond things you made that one week. People wereobsessed—“
“Juno.” Hazel’s voice cut through the air like a cold front moving in— not loud, but unmistakable. Sharp, then soft, like the snap of a twig underfoot.
Juno froze, mid-sentence, one hand clutching her half-unwrapped scarf, the other still waving a crumpled receipt like a flag of surrender. Her expression shifted, pulled taut by the undercurrent she hadn’t noticed before. Her gaze flickered around the bakery, and it seemed, in that moment, she realized something— that perhaps, when she had left in a flurry of cheer and excitement, she had taken all of the warmth from the bakery with her, leaving Hazel here alone and in the dark.
