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He deleted it.
His thumb hit the bin icon. The photo vanished and the grid reshuffled, closing the gap.
Ruari opened his recently deleted folder, but it wasn’t there. The photo was gone. Cassian and the dog, gone, because Ruari’s hands had moved faster than his brain could think.
His mobile hit the far wall with a crack.
By week three his rage had gone flat.
He stopped snapping at regulars, which was an improvement. He stopped caring whether they came in at all, which wasn’t. The flask moved from behind the bicarb to his back pocket, because if he kept it on his person he could top up between customers without Raf clocking the trips to the kitchen.
Notting Hill was a village dressed up with a Central London postcode. Everybody knew everybody, and information travelled through the market stalls and café queues. Mrs White had asked after Cassian twice in one week, her weekly sourdough order stretching to include questions about the nice young Australian she hadn’t seen around in a while, and Ruari had said he was well, thanks, and put her loaf through the slicer.
He saw Colin at Portobello Road, with the market in full swing, stalls crammed tight enough that two prams couldn’t pass without negotiation. Ruari was walking back from the wholesaler with a box of Valrhona cocoa balanced on one shoulder when the crowd thinned near the junction with Westbourne Grove and Colin was just there, twenty feet ahead, pushing Tala’s pram with one hand while the other held his mobile to his ear.
Colin’s gaze passed over him the way it would pass over a lamppost. He kept talking into his mobile, steered the pram around Ruari, and walked on.
✦ ✧ ✦
After that, the days ran together. Ruari got up at four, baked, sold, cleaned down, went upstairs, and could not have told anyone a single thing that had happened between the alarm and the last light off.
He didn’t notice February arrive. Somewhere in there he re-ordered flour twice, the first order forgotten, and the delivery man stacked forty unnecessary kilos of strong white in the corridor with Raf shaking his head.
The bread went off the boil. The scoring wandered, the bakes ran a shade past where he’d normally pull them, and a batch of baguettes came out dense enough that Raf picked one up, weighed it in his hand like a truncheon, and set it down again without a word. Ruari binned the tray himself.
The following Monday there was a new kid at the espresso machine, nineteen or twenty, terrified of the steam wand. “Trial shift,” Raf said. Ruari signed the timesheets and let Raf get the help he needed.
Then, in early March, he woke at half two with his heart going like a drum, consumed by the unshakeable conviction that miso belonged in a caramel.
The wind changed that fast. He pulled a guy from the Tesco Metro queue on a Wednesday, a physio with forearms and a flat in Ladbroke Grove, and it was easy, uncomplicated, over by eleven. The Elgin woman gave him a second go the next weekend, and this time his body showed up for it. He walked home whistling.
The flavour combination ideas kept coming. Miso caramel, yes, but also fennel pollen through a honey madeleine, black sesame folded into the pain suisse, a marmalade and rye number that arrived fully formed in the shower and had him dripping across the flat looking for a pen. He started the bake at four, then half three, then three, because the ideas queued up faster than the ovens could clear them, and the new kid arrived each morning to find the counter already crowded with baked goods.
Then the email landed. Mason Howarth, Mase, who’d played right midfield to Ruari’s centre forward at Villa before Arsenal came calling, wanted Proving Ground to cater his birthday. Viennoiserie for eighty and a centrepiece. His people had sent the enquiry through the website like Ruari was a stranger, but Mase had followed it up twenty minutes later with a text that just said need u to make me look good mate and a string of prayer-hands emojis.
Ruari read it twice, laughed out loud in the empty shop, and typed yes before the kettle had boiled.
He baked non-stop for days. Laminating at midnight, shaping at two, the radio up, the flask forgotten somewhere because who needed it, his hands faster and surer than they’d been in months. Every tray came out perfect. Every idea worked the first time. He stood in his kitchen at four in the morning surrounded by eighty flawless kouign-amann and felt absolutely fucking magnificent.
Mason’s people sent a photo of the centrepiece table, Ruari’s viennoiserie stacked in a golden pyramid under pendant lighting, surrounded by footballers’ wives, and Ruari saved it to his camera roll and opened it eleven times in the first hour.
He was pulling a tray of financiers at half two in the morning when his bare forearm pressed flat against its lip. The contact lasted two full seconds, and the pain arrived as a bright jolt that made him laugh.
He wiped his forearm on his apron and kept scoring the next tray. Then his hands stopped.
The burn was already blistering. It should have sent him to the cold tap. Instead he’d wiped it on his apron and kept working.
A normal person didn’t laugh when they seared a strip off their own arm.
Ruari set the scoring knife down on the counter and took stock of himself.
He’d gone two days without sleep. He’d fucked three people in as many weeks and couldn’t have picked one of them out of a line-up, because his cock had shown up for the performance while the rest of him stayed home waiting for a man who wasn’t coming back. He didn’t want any of them. He wanted Cassian tucked warm against his side on the sofa while Cass gave an earnest report on the new words he’d collected.
But his mania wanted things too. Mania made him want to bake at three in the morning, and to fuck the stranger against the wall behind the Elgin.
He was no better at knowing his own mind than Cassian was, and he had less excuse. He had a diagnosis, a prescription, and a GP. And every time the high came, he chose the elation and the flask.
His blister pack of meds was in the bathroom cabinet, behind a bottle of ibuprofen and a box of plasters he’d bought when Cassian cut his finger on the bread knife and bled on a pile of tea towels. Ruari returned to his flat, opened the cabinet, and pressed a tablet through the foil.
