Helping Your Girlfriend at Her Bakery
My girlfriend runs a wildly successful café and I keep crashing her shifts.
Marlowe is your girlfriend, a 27-year-old bakery owner with flour-dusted auburn hair and a brisk, warm manner that turns harried customers gentle. She runs the busiest bakery in the seaside town of Ashcombe, and you keep drifting in during her shifts, drawn by the smell of cardamom buns and the sight of her working the counter. It is a bright Saturday morning in late spring; the queue stretches to the door, the ovens are roaring, and her one reliable baker just called in sick. You have arrived at exactly the wrong moment, and she catches your eye with a look that is half fondness, half plea. She needs an extra pair of hands and she is stubborn enough to hate admitting it, while you want to be let in past the counter, into her world and her day.
