Page 2 of Unwrapped

She doesn’t know my name.

I’ve walked through this courtyard a thousand times. I’ve passed her shop window, seen her pulling taffy with an audience of kids on the cobblestones, heard her laugh carry across the Trading Post when the other women gather in the courtyard on summer evenings. I know her name is Millie. I know she owns the candy shop. I know she’s the one who’s always smiling, always handing something to someone, always bright.

She doesn’t know I exist.

“Weston Blair,” I say. “Station 1. I saw the smoke.”

“Oh.”

She lets out a breath, looking at the destroyed pot in the sink, the black residue climbing the copper walls. Then something happens to her face—a reset, fast, practiced. The frustration smooths out. The jaw unclenches. She reaches for a tray on the counter and holds it toward me, and there it is. The smile. Wide, warm, effortless.

“Caramel? I have a batch from yesterday. Since tonight’s batch is…” She gestures at the smoking sink. “Deceased.”

She laughs. The sound is bright, easy, and wrong.

I know what it looks like when someone puts on a front to make a room more comfortable. My mother did it every morning for three years after my father left—coffee on, smile on, everything fine. My brother did it over the phone from whatever base he was stationed at, voice light and easy and already gone.

And this woman is doing it now. Standing in a smoke-filled shop with a ruined batch and burnt caramel under her fingernails, offering me candy with a smile she assembled in two seconds flat because someone walked in, and she doesn’t know how to be anything but sweet when someone’s watching.

I don’t take the caramel.

“You were different thirty seconds ago,” I tell her.

The smile flickers. “What?”

“Before you saw me. When it was just you and the pot.” I look at the sink, the smoke still curling off the water. “You were mad. You were swearing. Your hands were shaking. Then I showed up, and all of that disappeared.” I look back at her. “I’m not interested in the version of you that just showed up. The one before was better.”

The tray lowers an inch. Her mouth opens, but nothing comes out. The smile is gone, and underneath it, her face is open and startled. Something about that unguarded blankness hits me harder than the smoke did.

I shouldn’t have said that. I walked into a stranger’s shop because I saw smoke, and now I’m standing in her space telling her I prefer the version of her that doesn’t know she’s being watched. That’s not a thing you say. That’s not a thing a quiet man who minds his own business and keeps his head down says to a woman he’s never spoken to.

But my hands are tingling and my pulse is doing something it doesn’t do, and the offer in my back pocket feels heavier than it did five minutes ago. Five minutes ago, leaving Copper Peak meant leaving the crew. Now it means leaving a room with this woman in it, and I’ve been in that room for less than three minutes.

“The smoke’s clearing,” I say. “You should open the back door for cross ventilation.”

I leave. The courtyard is dark and cool, and the cobblestones are steady under my boots. I walk all the way to Prospect Street before I stop, put my hands on my knees, and breathe.

That night, I don’t sleep. I lie in bed and look at the ceiling and think about a woman swearing at a copper pot with caramel in her hair. I remember the way her face looked in the two seconds between the smoke clearing and the smile taking over.

Unguarded. Unsweetened. Real.

2

MILLIE

Iburn the first batch of caramels at 5:47 a.m.

Not the way I burned last night’s batch—full scorched-pot, smoke-alarm, firefighter-in-my-doorway disaster. This is a small burn. A distraction burn. The sugar hits hard crack while I’m staring at the spot on the floor where he stood, and by the time I catch it, the batch has gone dark and bitter, and I have to scrape the pot and start over.

I scrape the pot and start over. That’s what I do.

The Trading Post wakes up around me in pieces. Lea’s light comes on first—always first, always before anyone else, the coffee shop glowing amber through the courtyard while the rest of the buildings are still dark. Through my shop window, I can see her moving behind the counter, Gemma beside her restocking the pastry case. Five years of watching Lea open up from this angle, and I know the routine by heart. Espresso machine first, then the pastry case, then the front door.

Laurelle is next. She arrives at 6:15, and I hear the scrape of a metal bucket on cobblestones as she hauls her first load of flowers out to the display by her doorway. Ranunculus today, from the colors I can see through my window. Laurelle always has pollen somewhere—her fingers, her jaw, the crook of her elbow. She catches me looking through the glass and waves with the hand that isn’t holding stems. I wave back.

Neve’s workshop is still dark, but it never quite stops smelling like her—beeswax and whatever fragrance she was building yesterday filter through the old stone walls and into the courtyard. This morning it’s clove and raw honey, lingering from the batch she poured last night. I know Neve’s scent calendar better than I know my own inventory. September means she’s shifting to fall blends.

I’m shifting to fall too. That’s what last night was supposed to be—the first batch of autumn caramels, the start of the seasonal pivot. Candied apples, caramel corn in harvest bags, the window display that pulls tourists off Prospect Street and into the courtyard. I’ve done this transition every year since I opened. I’m good at it. I love it.