Page 148 of Just One Little Bargain

“No,” she says. “I don’t. But I need some space to think about all of this.”

She turns away and walks out of the narrow passage, crossing the grass toward the parking lot.

Every instinct in me demands that I follow, explain, apologize properly, put myself between her and every terrible choice waiting beyond tonight.

But she asked for distance, so I remain in the dark and let her go.

Chapter 43

Evie

Turns out you can find out your life has a return policy and still get up at dawn to bake for strangers, because the alternative is lying in bed alone with your own thoughts, and mine haven’t been pleasant company lately. After the weekend I’ve had, being outmaneuvered by a commercial oven before seven in the morning feels less surprising than it should.

The door won’t open. I wrap both hands around the handle, brace my weight through my heels, and haul backward until my shoulders protest. The hinges don’t so much as creak. The seal has fused itself shut through some mechanical failure I can’t diagnose. Behind the glass, my double-chocolate chunk cookies deepen from golden brown to mahogany, their glossy centers disappearing beneath a spreading char.

I keep telling myself this is a repair, a line item, a thing with a solution, and not one more proof that I’ve been holding the entire operation together on willpower and denial.

I tug again. The handle bites into my palms, but the door gives me nothing.

The smoke detector goes off next.

“Fantastic,” I mutter, grabbing the broom and jabbing the reset button. The shrieking stops, though its echo keeps needling the back of my skull. That shrill insistence that something is wrong, wrong, wrong, which I can’t seem to switch off no matter how many buttons I hit.

Burned sugar and scorched chocolate seep through the oven seal, filling the kitchen. By now, the cookies are unsalvageable. I know that. Still, I return to the handle and test it once more, because apparently I haven’t learned when to stop trying to save what’s beyond my reach.

Arms shaking, dignity nonexistent, I make the same shameful calculation that’s followed me since the festival.

One signature, and Foxglove stops being the place I’m forever trying to save.

And the price wouldn’t come due until I was dead. By then, what would I care where my soul went? I’d have had years of the Foxglove Inn blossoming.

For several dangerous seconds, the bargain doesn’t sound so bad.

The door tears open with a metallic crack, pitching me backward as smoke billows into my face. I cough until my eyes stream, waving one arm through the bitter cloud. The thought retreats, but it doesn’t disappear.

I set the ruined tray on the stovetop and stare at twenty-four charred cookies welded into glossy black islands. Then I remember the spare batch. I always make one, because experience has taught me that ovens fail, guests arrive early, and somebody inevitably drops a pan at the exact moment there’s no time to start over. The cookies are waiting in the pantry beneath parchment and plastic wrap.

I wedge the oven door open with a wooden spoon and carry the tray toward the trash can. One solvable problem at a time.

Milo rounds the corner, surveys the smoke-filled kitchen, then silently starts opening windows.

Ah, yes. Our new favorite choreography. I call it Two People Who Definitely Need to Talk Choosing Manual Labor Instead.

Yesterday’s rendition was particularly impressive. He opened with an earnest pivot toward vulnerability, and I countered with a devastating redirection to the linen closet. He attempted a second approach in the herb garden, and I met him with a Not now—my preferred defense against emotional availability since puberty.

I didn’t throw him out. The old me would’ve. Self-preservation used to be the one thing I was genuinely good at. But Milo became the person I wanted badly enough to unsettle every rule I’d built my life around. I’d begun to trust that his affection could survive the parts of me I usually kept under lock and key: the temper, the fear, the need I hated anyone seeing. Worse, I’d started wanting him to know them all and stay.

That’s the truth I keep avoiding. Even now, losing him feels worse than being angry with him. What happened at the festival changed everything, but it didn’t erase what I feel for him. I still want the future I started to picture before Krell showed me how easily it could be used against me.

He’ll be gone in five days. That was always the deadline. Milo never promised permanence. Now part of me wants it over today, wants the waiting cut short so the loss becomes a fact I know how to survive.

But then I look at him, and five days feels brutally short. Whatever this has become between us is still new and unfinished.

My phone buzzes on the counter. I grab it and an email fills the screen: So sorry for the late notice, but we need to cancel our reservation for tonight. Family emergency. Hope you understand.

The policy means I keep half the deposit, but that doesn’t cover the loss of revenue. The numbers rearrange themselves in my head: less income, more pressure on next month’s mortgage payment.

“Everything okay?” Milo asks.