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“Tessa, I can’t think about alternatives right now.”

“You can look. Looking isn’t committing.”

Ronan texted Knox at noon.

Ronan: I made a spreadsheet analyzing Lucy’s options. Should I bring it?

Knox: Yes. But don’t present it as a spreadsheet.

Ronan: What should I present it as?

Knox: A conversation.

Ronan: That’s significantly harder.

He arrived anyway, twenty minutes later, with a leather folder and stiff shoulders. He’d practiced being casual, and he was failing at it. He sat at the end of the table, opened the folder, and said, “I’ve had some thoughts.”

“He made a spreadsheet,” Devney said.

“It’s color-coded,” Ronan said, without apology.

“Of course it is,” Lucy said. Her voice cracked on the last word. She covered it by picking up her coffee.

“Green is viable,” Ronan continued, undeterred. “Yellow is conditional. Red is inadvisable. I considered adding a fourth tier in blue for ‘emotionally satisfying but financially irrational,’ but Devney said that was condescending.”

“It was,” Devney confirmed.

“I included it anyway. It’s tab two.”

“It’s also helpful,” Knox said, because it was. Ronan had mapped every variable. Lease terms, renovation costs, foot traffic patterns, neighborhood demographics, and proximity to transit. The analysis was thorough, and the fact that he’d spent his morning building it for her because she mattered to the people he loved said everything his numbers couldn’t.

Lucy stared at the numbers, at Tessa’s list, at Devney’s bag of sympathy croissants, at the table surrounded by people she hadn’t called who had shown up anyway.

Her jaw tightened and her eyes went bright. Knox watched her refuse to cry, not here, not in the bakery she’d built from her own recipes and a thousand mornings that started before dawn. He was only beginning to understand what it had cost her.

Mrs. Hadley came through the kitchen door. She’d entered from the back, through the shared wall access that Lucy had never locked because Mrs. Hadley didn’t believe in boundaries between neighbors.

She surveyed the room. The numbers, the list, the people.

“The bakery is not the building, Lucy.” Her voice carried the compressed authority of a woman who had survived three recessions and a pandemic and the indignity of a neighborhood that had decided her dry cleaner was quaint. “The bakery is you.”

Lucy pressed her lips together. Her hands were flat on the table. Knox could see the tension in her knuckles, the whitened pressure, the effort it cost her to hold still when everything she’d constructed was shifting.

Mrs. Hadley turned to Knox. She studied him with patience, without mercy, and with the settled conviction that her conclusions were beyond revision. “You’re still here,” she said.

“Yes.”

“Good.”

She went back through the kitchen. Knox let out a breath.

The others left gradually. Tessa had a two o’clock meeting. Devney kissed Lucy’s temple and whispered something Knox couldn’t hear. Ronan collected his folder, hesitated, then left the printout on the table. “Keep it. I have four backup copies.” He paused at the door. “Devney says I should tell you that this will be okay. I don’t have sufficient data to confirm that, but I trust Devney’s instincts more than my models. And my models are excellent.”

Then it was Knox and Lucy.

The bakery moved around them, the afternoon regulars filtering in and out while Bree handled the counter. Marco was in the kitchen, quiet, working, giving Lucy the space she needed by doing what he always did, keeping the bakery running while she figured out what came next.

“You can go,” Lucy said. Her voice was tired. “You don’t need to sit here.”