On Wednesday, Agnes gives me the afternoon off.
“You need to know the town,” she says, pressing a twenty-dollar bill into my hand with the quiet authority of a woman who will not accept refusal. “Go to Harbor Roasters for a decent cup of coffee. Walk the boardwalk. Introduce yourself — they’ll know you’re here by now anyway. Small towns are faster than the internet.”
She’s right about that. By Wednesday afternoon, my existence in Saltbreeze Harbor has apparently been filed, cataloged, and distributed through whatever invisible network carries information in a town of three thousand people. The woman at Harbor Roasters — Dina, dark-haired, early forties, with the easy warmth of someone who has never met a stranger — knows my name before I give it.
“You’re the new baker at Hawthorn House,” she says, sliding a lavender latte across the counter. “Agnes called this morning. Said you’re decent.”
“Decent. High praise.”
“From Agnes? That’s basically a standing ovation.” Dina grins. “Welcome to Saltbreeze, Tess. If you need anything — directions, gossip, someone to complain about the fog with — I’m here six days a week.”
I take my latte and walk the boardwalk. The harbor is beautiful in the afternoon light — the water is steel-blue, the boats are bright white, and the air smells like salt and frying fish and the cedar that seems to be the baseline scent of the entire town. There are tourists in windbreakers taking photos, fishermen mending nets, a couple walking a golden retriever that has somehow gotten its leash tangled around a parking meter.
The boardwalk curves past a fish market, a souvenir shop, and then an art gallery with a hand-painted sign that reads LILY’S — FINE ART & CUSTOM WORK. The paintings in the window are gorgeous — loose, impressionistic seascapes in blues and greens and golds that make the harbor look like something out of a dream.
I stop to look, and the door opens.
“You’re staring,” says the woman in the doorway. She’s about my age — twenty-eight, maybe — with auburn hair that falls in loose waves past her shoulders and paint smudges on her fingers. She’s wearing a denim apron over a white linen shirt, and she has the kind of effortless beauty that makes you want to both admire and resent her simultaneously. “I take that as a compliment.”
“They’re beautiful,” I say, and mean it. “The light in that one —” I point to a painting of the harbor at sunset, where the water looks like it’s been set on fire. “How do you get it to glow like that?”
“Lots of layers,” she says. “And a willingness to ruin the first six attempts.” She extends a paint-stained hand. “Lily Bancroft. You must be Tess.”
“Does everyone in this town know my name?”
“Everyone in this town knows everything.” She grins. “Agnes is my godmother. She told me about you at lunch the other day. Said you make a scone that could end wars.” She leans against the doorframe. “Come in. I’ll show you around. I could use a break anyway — I’ve been trying to paint the same wave for three hours and it keeps looking like a bedsheet.”
Her gallery is small but luminous — whitewashed walls, natural light from a skylight, paintings everywhere in various states of completion. There’s a work table covered in tubes of paint and jars of brushes, a battered leather couch, and a record player that’s currently spinning something by Fleetwood Mac.
“How long have you been painting?” I ask, looking at a series of small canvases — flowers from the garden at Hawthorn House, I realize. Roses, lavender, the orchids from the conservatory.
“Since I could hold a brush. Agnes and George basically raised me after my parents moved to Arizona. I spent half my childhood at Hawthorn House, stealing cookies from Agnes’s kitchen and painting in the garden.” Her voice softens. “George used to sit with me and name all the flowers. He knew every one.”
Something crosses her face — a shadow, or a memory she doesn’t want to examine too closely. Then she shakes it off.
“So — what’s your story, Tess? Agnes says Portland, a bakery, and then she got very tight-lipped, which usually means there’s a man involved.”
I laugh, despite myself. “There was a man. He stole my bakery.”
Lily’s eyes widen. “Literally?”
“Financially. He was my business partner. Embezzled the business into debt and disappeared with his new girlfriend.”
“Men,” Lily says, with a world-weary authority that suggests she has her own collection of stories. “Well, you’re here now. And Agnes clearly loves you, which means you must be extraordinary, because that woman’s approval is harder to get than a parking spot on the Fourth of July.”
We talk for another twenty minutes. Lily is warm, funny, and disarmingly honest — she tells me about the town’s gossip networks, the upcoming Harbor Days festival, and the local politics of the pie-baking contest that Agnes has apparently won twelve years running. She also mentions, in a tone that’s carefully casual, that Victor Crane visited her gallery yesterday.
“He bought a painting,” she says. “The harbor sunset. He’s charming, isn’t he? Very… attentive.”
The way she says attentive makes me think she means something more than polite interest, but I don’t push.
I leave the gallery and walk toward the library, which is housed in a beautiful old building at the end of the main street. Inside, it’s warm and quiet and smells like old books and lemon polish. A woman in her mid-thirties is shelving books with the focused precision of someone who finds peace in order. She has dark hair cut in a sharp bob, wire-rimmed glasses, and the kind of quiet beauty that you don’t notice until the second or third time you look.
“Can I help you?” she asks, not looking up.
“I’m Tess. I’m the new cook at —”
“Hawthorn House. Yes, I know.” She finishes shelving a book and turns to face me. “Marina Delacroix. I run the library and the Saltbreeze Archives — our local history collection. Agnes mentioned you might be interested.”
“I’m interested in everything right now. I’m still figuring out where I am.”
Marina’s mouth curves into something that’s almost a smile. “Saltbreeze Harbor. Population 3,142. Incorporated 1903. Originally a fishing village, now primarily a tourist town with a strong arts community. We have one bar, one coffee shop, one gallery, one library, and more retired people per capita than anywhere in Oregon.”
“That’s a very thorough introduction.”
“I’m a librarian. Thorough is what we do.” She hesitates, then: “Agnes said you had a bakery in Portland. If you ever want to look through the archives — old recipes, town history, that sort of thing — you’re welcome.”
She opens a display drawer to show me a church cookbook from the nineties. Agnes’s shortbread recipe fills one yellowing page. Beside it is a photograph of biscuits on a cooling rack, each marked with two rows of fork holes.
“We made those for the archive fundraiser,” Marina says. “I borrowed the old pastry tin. Agnes lets me borrow half her kitchen, provided I bring everything back cleaner.”
On the desk behind her, a blue biscuit tin holds index cards. A strip of yellow tape covers one corner of the lid. I recognize the tin from Agnes’s pantry shelves, where an empty rectangular space waits between the flour and the tea.
I thank her and browse the shelves, but my eyes keep drifting to Marina. She’s returned to her shelving, but there’s a tension in her shoulders that wasn’t there before, and she keeps glancing toward the back of the library — toward a door marked STAFF ONLY — as if she’s waiting for someone.
I take a book on Oregon coastal wildflowers — something to fill the quiet hours in the attic — and leave. As I’m walking back toward the boardwalk, I pass the library’s rear windows and stop.
Through the glass, in the narrow alley between the library and the building next door, Marina is standing with Victor Crane.
They’re speaking quietly. Victor has his notebook out. Marina is holding a manila folder, and as I watch, she hands it to him. Their body language isn’t romantic — it’s focused, conspiratory, like two people sharing information they don’t want anyone else to see.
Victor opens the folder. He reads something inside. Marina watches him, her face tense and hopeful and afraid all at once.
Then Marina looks up.
She sees me through the window.
Her face drains of color. Not embarrassment — something deeper. Fear. The folder is still in Victor’s hands, and Marina reaches for it, but Victor shakes his head and tucks it inside his jacket.
Marina’s eyes meet mine through the glass, and in them I see something I recognize from my own reflection six days ago: the look of a person who has a secret and has just realized she’s been seen keeping it.
I turn away. I walk back toward Hawthorn House, the wildflower book damp beneath my palm.
I tell myself it’s none of my business.
I almost believe it.