"A devoted husband," Dominic said, "would have met his wife's father by now."
Ana nearly dropped the laptop. It was Sunday morning, shared kitchen, her second coffee, and she'd been ignoring the card in her bag for six days with tremendous discipline.
"No."
"Mr. Pell will ask."
"Mr. Pell won't come for ten months."
"Then I'll have met him ten months early." He folded his newspaper. "What time does the bakery open?"
"Five. It's Sunday. It'll be packed. You'll hate it."
"I don't hate things."
"You hated the regatta."
"I hated the boat," he said. "That's different. Get your coat."
She tried three more times in the car. She said Mateo would be unbearable. She said Corliss Avenue had nowhere to park, and Dominic looked at her as if parking were a problem that happened to other people, and the driver pulled up directly in front of the striped awning in a space that, apparently, had always been waiting for him.
Ana watched his face as he got out.
This was the moment. If he'd been looking for the shop in that photograph, if he'd spent eight months trying to place a striped awning and a painted window, then here it was, the same letters, the same glass, nine blocks from his front door.
Dominic glanced at the window. He glanced at the line of people out the door. He held the car door for her and said, "You were right about the parking."
Nothing. Not a flicker.
Relief went through her so hard that her knees felt loose. Vivienne Strand bought guava pastries here, by her own account, and Mrs. Ocampo from the laundromat would tell anyone anything for a free coffee. Gossip, and a poisonous columnist filling the gaps. That was all. Ana could tell him in her own time, once her father was ready. She could fix this the way she fixed everything, with a plan.
Inside, it was chaos. The bell over the door. The smell of anise and burnt sugar and coffee. A queue of regulars in church clothes and running gear, and Mateo behind the counter in a hairnet, shouting orders over the radio.
He saw Dominic and stopped shouting.
The whole bakery seemed to stop with him. Mrs. Ocampo turned around with her purse open.
"Oh no," Mateo said, with deep joy. "The husband."
"Mateo," Ana said.
"He's very tall. Nobody told me he'd be this tall. Hi. I'm the brother. I've seen your hotel. It has a fountain inside it, which I find frankly aggressive."
"It came with the building," Dominic said.
"Do you want a concha? Of course you want a concha. Everybody wants one. Vanilla or chocolate?"
Dominic studied the case. "Which do you recommend?"
"Nobody's ever asked me that," Mateo said, moved. "Chocolate. Obviously. Ana, he's polite. Why didn't you tell us he was polite?"
"Where's Papi?"
"Back. The oven's doing the thing again."
The oven was doing the thing. Ana heard it as soon as she pushed through the swinging door: a low clank, a hiss, a rattle like loose bolts in a dryer. Her father was on his knees in front of it with a wrench and a torch, swearing at it in the soft affectionate Spanish he used for machines and grandchildren.
"Papi. This is Dominic."
Tomás Reyes looked up.
She watched it happen. She watched her father's eyes go to Dominic's face, and stay there, and go very still. The wrench in his hand lowered an inch. For a second he wasn't a sixty-two-year-old baker on a cold tile floor. He was the young man in the photograph, one hand raised against the sun.
Then he stood up, wiped his hand on his apron, and offered it.
"Mr. Hartley."
"Dominic. Please."
"Dominic." Her father's voice was rough. He held the handshake a beat too long. "Welcome. Excuse the mess. The oven, she's old. Like me."
"How old?"
"Thirty-one years."
Dominic crouched down beside the oven door and looked at it with the same total attention he gave everything. Then he looked at the letter stuck to the wall above it, held up with a magnet shaped like a pineapple. FINAL NOTICE. The landlord's crest at the top. Ana had meant to take it down.
He read it in about two seconds.
"Who owns the building?" he asked.
"A company," her father said. "Calloway something. They bought it in the spring. Before that, the same old man for thirty years. He never raised it once."
"I could buy it this week."
He said it the way he'd said I do. A confirmation of a figure.
"No," Ana said.
Both men looked at her.
"Ana," her father began.
"No. Thank you. That's not part of the arrangement." Her face was hot. She could feel the flour in the air sticking to her skin. "The settlement covers the bakery. That was the deal. We'll do it the way we planned."
"The way you planned," Dominic said, "the bakery waits ten months. That letter says sixty days."
"I'm aware of what the letter says."
"Then let me..."
"I don't need rescuing."
It came out louder than she meant. Out front, the radio was playing a cumbia and someone laughed at the counter, and back here there was only the tick of the dying oven.
Dominic stood. He looked at the oven, and the letter on the wall, and finally at her, for a long moment, with those light, unreadable eyes.
"No," he said slowly. "I'm beginning to think I might."
Then his phone buzzed, and he excused himself with perfect courtesy, and went out through the back door into the alley to take it.
Ana stood very still. So did her father.
"Mija," he said, after a while. "Close the door."
She closed it.
He sat down on the flour sacks, heavily, where she'd sat as a child, and turned the wrench over and over in his hands.
"He has her hands," he said. "Did you see? Long fingers. The way he held them, together, when he was thinking. She did that."
"Papi. Tell me."
"I promised her."
"She's dead. He's her son. He plays eight bars of a song she sang every night because he can't remember the rest of it."
Her father flinched as if she'd hit him.
"It's a lullaby," he said. "From her mother's village. She sang it at that bench for eleven years while she worked."
The kitchen tilted.
"Eleven years," Ana said.
"She didn't die on the coast road. She came here with nothing but a cake box and a coat. She worked at that bench, beside me, and she lived in the room upstairs, and when she got sick she stayed there until the end." He looked up at her with wet eyes. "You knew her, mija. You were six. You called her Tía Bel."