EMBER’S POV

I don’t tell them this was my idea and my recipe and my stubbornness that carried it to their door. His name is the only thing in this shop that’s made either of them set down what they were holding.

The two old people look at each other.

It’s a long look, and a strange one, a whole conversation passing between them without a single word, years of marriage compressed into the tilt of two heads.

And when it ends, the woman exhales through her nose and pushes the ledger an inch to the side, which I sense is, for her, an enormous concession.

“Well,” she says. “You...