Page 87 of Rise
“You did?” she asked, leaning forward. “Where to?”
Hazel hesitated again. The truth was simple, but saying it aloud felt like cracking something open. Like admitting a truth she had been quietly keeping locked away for months.
“Bar Harbor,” she said. “I moved back.”
A beat of silence stretched between them.
Then her mother’s face shifted, a large smile tugging at the edges of her lips.
“Oh, sweetheart,” she gushed, her voice heavy with unspoken emotion. “Gram must be so happy to have you back.”
Hazel’s heart thudded once, deep and low. Her stomach dipped to the floor, nausea tinged with regret burning at the back of her throat.
But she managed to force a smile, even as every inch of her ached with the effort of it.
“Yeah,” she agreed, nodding. “She is.”
She couldn’t correct her, she couldn’t simply sayNo, Mom, she’s gone. She died in August.She couldn’t explain the call from the lawyer, or the ride back through fog, or the smell of lingering lavender and dust in the house she’d walked into alone.
There was no part of her that wanted to drop that weight into the stillness of this room.
Her mother didn’t need that grief, not now. Not when she looked likeherself.
Somewhere she’d read that for people like her mother, people who needed the scaffolding of routine, of calm, of consistency, grief could do more than sting. It could undo. It could crack the fragile thread of stability they spent weeks trying to hold. A well-intentioned truth could become a landslide.
So Hazel didn’t say it. She let the smile hold.
“I’ve opened a bakery on Main Street,” she said instead, careful to keep that same smile in place. It was easier, the further away they treaded from the truth. “Gram put together the building for me— it was the old marine supply shop, if you remember. It’s called Rise now.”
“Rise,” her mother repeated, her smile widening. She let the word settle in her mouth like a favourite flavour. “That’s perfect. It sounds like you.”
“Gram picked the name. I think it’s perfect.”
Hazel’s mother nodded, her eyes nothing but warm as they remained on her. “Oh, of course it is. She always knew you best.”
And then, as if an afterthought had arrived on a cool, wintery breeze, her mother shifted, curiosity lifting one of her brows. “Do you have any pictures?”
Hazel nodded and reached into her pocket for her phone, thumbed it awake, and scrolled to the bakery’s Instagram. She pulled up a photo Juno had taken a few days earlier, one Hazel hadn’t meant to like as much as she did.
In the image, she stood behind the front counter at Rise, the pastry case gleaming in front of her, rows of cinnamon buns and galettes arranged like something reverent. Her apron was pressed flat and clean, her braid tucked neatly over one shoulder, and her smile reached all the way to her eyes. The early light pooled through the window ahead of her, casting the whole space in a soft, golden glow.
She turned the screen toward her mother.
She adjusted the angle, carefully, bringing the phone closer to her face. Her eyes moved over every inch of it— Hazel’s face, the curve of the pastry case, the soft gleam of morning light caught on glass.
“Oh,” she breathed. Her hand rose to her chest, fingers splaying gently. “Hazel… it’s beautiful.”
She looked up, eyes shining. “It looks like your place. Like it belongs to you.”
Hazel blinked, throat tightening.
Her mother’s voice softened even more. “It looks like home.”
Hazel’s fingers curled into her lap. She hadn’t expected that, not in so many words. Not fromher.
“Thank you,” she said, her voice catching on the edges. “That means a lot.”
Her mother looked at the photo a moment longer, then tapped the edge of the screen with her thumbnail. “Do you make those?” she asked, nodding toward Hazel’s take on a cinnamon bun— her most popular item, ever since she’d opened.
