The dough fought her the way it always did at the start, stubborn and cold, clinging to the heels of her hands. Odalys Venn pressed down, folded, turned, pressed again, and felt the moment arrive when the resistance gave way and the whole mass softened into something alive. Behind her the great brick oven breathed its amber heat across the flagstones. Outside, beyond the salt-fogged window, the harbor lights of Marrow Point trembled on black water, and the clock above the flour bins said ten past twelve.
She had unlocked the door at midnight, as she did every night, and left the sign turned to its single word: OPEN. There was no other sign. In forty years no one in town had needed to be told what the bakery was for.
The bell rang before she'd finished shaping the first loaves. Teodor Brask came in sideways, the way he did everything, shoulders hunched against a wind that had stopped blowing hours ago. He was eighty if he was a day, his hands knotted from decades of net and rope, his coat still smelling of diesel and herring. He lowered himself onto the stool nearest the oven without a word and held his palms to the heat.