Page 130 of What Remains of Grace

She let her gaze drift from the plaques to the big chalkboard menu on the opposite wall, the one that had been there since her grandmother’s time, its frame nicked and edges worn smooth by decades of hands.

The top line had never changed with Grace’s looping script—or what remained of it. If you looked closely, you could see where the strokes had been traced. Chalk lines layered over chalk lines, like rings in a tree. A year or so after the court battle, on a slow afternoon, Emmie had dragged a chair over, climbed up, and carefully redrawn every letter her mother had left behind.

“I’m not letting this fade,” she’d said, tongue poking out of the corner of her mouth as she worked. “Not if I can help it.”

“You know it’s just chalk,” Jenna had replied, throat thick. “It’s going to wear down no matter what we do.”

“Then I’ll keep rewriting it,” Emmie had said. “Not everything we love has to stay the same to stay with us.”

Now that little sentence lived on a piece of reclaimed wood hung beside the pastry case, the letters burned in by hand, right next to Grace’s cracked old recipe for lemon bars:

NOT EVERYTHING WE LOVE HAS TO STAY THE SAME TO STAY WITH US.

Jenna looked at everything in this place that proved it.

The chalkboard was Grace. But it was also Emmie now, her retraced lines, her updated prices. Em had been merciless about those.

Grace’s blueberry scones, which had been $3.25, were now $3.75. The $4.00 key lime loaf was now $4.50.

“Inflation,” Emmie had announced. “Egg prices are outrageous. I’m going to have to find a new weapon of choice.”

The floral notebook sat by the register, and beside it lay Emmie’s binder—now thick with three generations of recipes: Grandma Hart’s, Grace’s, and Emmie’s own additions.

Another slab of reclaimed wood hung above the coffee bar, the edges sanded smooth, the message scorched dark against the grain:

IF LOVE RUNS OUT, JUST MAKE MORE.

Even after everything, the words still held.

The bakery was full of little ghosts of her sister. Not just the chalk and the recipes, but the pieces of her that had seeped into the walls and refused to leave.

Her spirit was in the way Nicole sang off-key and too loudly when the morning rush hit. Her legacy was in the way the regulars slid into their usual seats like pews.

Her fierce, stubborn heart lives on in her daughter, who would go to war over cupcake pricing and zoning laws with equal enthusiasm.

Grace’s face was in photographs, behind the counter, at a ribbon cutting, holding baby Emmie with flour on her cheek. Her voice lived in the stupid puns on the tip jar, the handwritten notes on the staff bulletin board, the way people said, “You know what Grace used to do?” and then did it.

Jenna had learned, painfully and slowly, that this was what grief really was. Not a season, not an ending, but a thread woven into the soul: love, hate, joy, and sorrow layered in a pattern too complicated to unravel. Grief was simply the cost of loving deeply, a tax none of them could avoid. If the bill never came to you, it came to the people who loved you. And somehow, knowing that made the ghosts feel less like shadows and more like proof that love had existed at all.

“Boss?” Nicole called from behind the counter. “You okay? You’re staring at the wall like it owes you money.”

“Just admiring our fine collection of motivational decor,” she said, pulling herself gently out of the swirl of memory.

Her phone buzzed in her apron pocket.

She fished it out, glanced at the screen, and her heart did a weird, dropping lurch. Aunt M.

Her thumb hovered over the answer icon.

Aunt Marilyn did not call. She texted. She voice-memoed. She sent blurry photos of grandkids, baked goods, and the occasional meme she one hundred percent did not understand.

Phone calls meant . . . something.

She slipped through the staff door to the back hallway, away from the clatter of dishes and the espresso hiss.

She answered on the second ring. “Hey, Aunt M.”

“Hey, sweetheart,” Marilyn said, calm and bright as always. “You busy?”