Jane stood and turned towards the door just in time to see four separate customers entering at once. They had gathered on the street to talk about the new open shop before coming in together. All four milled around, complimenting the new set-up while perusing various goods. They were nice about the whole process, trying to make Jane feel welcome when they could while still going about the business of acquiring food.

  By the time they left, she had sold two loaves of bread and a dozen cookies. She also had a dinner hold for keln and an entire chocolate cake.

  Jane did some quick math on how much product she had moved already and how much time was left in the day. Cookies would go first, it looked like, followed by normal loaves, and then all of her keln. The cake was a wild card, but it would only take one more cake-buyer to clear her out.

  “I’m going to run out,” she fretted. “Or come close.”

  “Maybe. Remember people get busy as the day goes on. But yes, it looks good for you.”

  “Won’t people be disappointed if I’m cleaned out by the time they get here?”

  “Oh, Jane, you sweet summer child.” Bella bent down and bonked their foreheads together affectionately. “Why would that happen? You still have ovens, don’t you?”

  Jane blinked a few times. Somehow, she had forgotten she could continue baking throughout the day to resupply the tables if necessary. After trying and failing to make herself feel less foolish for forgetting this, she sighed.

  “Darn.”

  “You get a pass, Jane. It’s easy to forget things on a big day. That’s why your friend Bella is here.”

  Bella turned out to be an indispensable part of Jane’s Bakery’s opening day. Whenever Jane didn’t understand some local custom or was about to make a mistake that even a child would have noticed, Bella swooped in and prevented whatever pending disaster was queued up from being a problem at all.

  The flow of customers continued as the morning went on. Word was spreading. Folks of all kinds came in to secure bread for late breakfasts, lunches, and planned dinners until right at noon, when the traffic abruptly stopped.

  “Now it’s time to eat,” Bella said authoritatively. “Everyone who didn’t have their food planned already will go to stands that make hot, fresh food. You have about an hour before anyone comes in again. Maybe more.”

  “Good.” Jane immediately began circling her display tables. Selecting a half-dozen cookies, a full loaf of bread, and some keln, she packaged them up nicely and placed the bag behind the counter. “There. I was hoping I’d get a minute to do that.”

  “Who is that for? Some customer I missed?”

  “Not exactly. Just something I’m setting aside.”

  Jane shuffled over to her stovetop to put the kettle on. She didn’t expect she could hide the entire truth from Bella, but she wasn’t up to feeling even more flustered than she already was at the moment.

  The lunchtime lull passed. The stream of customers returned, quite a bit slower but still steady. When it finally ceased again around midafternoon, the shop was fairly empty. Almost everything had either been bought or was reserved behind the counter.

  Jane slumped wearily on her stool. Whatever ‘baking adrenaline’ had been sustaining her all day was now fading fast. Remembering their earlier conversation, she wondered if now was the time to fire up the ovens and whip up some more products. But when she asked about this, Bella responded with an encouraging no.

  “Late afternoon is sort of like right before lunchtime,” Bella explained. “Most people who want baked goods for dinner have already made those arrangements. I doubt you’ll get many more customers today.”

  As if in direct contradiction, the door opened. Jane struggled upright and tried to force a welcoming smile. Then, seeing who it was, she found herself perking right up.

  This was a different kind of customer.

  “Hi, Jane.” Allen waved and smiled as he entered. He had an easy, happy sort of expression at first, but it instantly crumbled and was replaced by dismay as he looked around the shop. “Oh, wow. It’s already almost gone. I’m late.”

  “Yes, you are,” Bella admonished him. “I’d think you would have gotten here faster, considering how important of a day it is.”

  “Oh, leave him alone, Bella. He has his own shop to run.” Jane took a bit of satisfaction from Allen’s relief, then reached behind the counter to grab her special bundle. “Besides, he had a dinner hold, even if he didn’t know about it.”

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  Allen’s face brightened significantly when he looked through the bag. “Wow. It’s everything I wanted to buy. How did you know?”

  “It’s just everything you knew I could bake.” Jane smiled. “I made a guess.”

  “Well, thanks. How much coin is all this?”

  “Oh. It’s none, I guess? You gave me that nice coat yesterday. This isn’t worth anywhere near as much as that.” Jane saw him preparing him to object and quickly changed the subject. “You are welcome to stay if you want, but I think it’s just going to be waiting around for people to pick up their dinner orders now. I hadn’t thought about that part of things, Bella. Am I basically stuck here until evening?”

  “I think you are for now. Shelby, the woman who was here before you, always kept dinner holds inside. Nice lady, but her social life didn’t start until the sun went down.” Bella tapped the counter thoughtfully. “There are other ways, though.”

  “Like a call rack,” Allen suggested. “It’s a little cabinet that people leave orders in. You have enough room out front for one, and it would free up your time. People just come, open the cabinet door, and drop their coins through a little slot for you to collect later.”

  Jane nodded slowly. She wouldn’t have expected something like that to work, but once again, she was looking at it through city eyes. It didn’t seem like anyone in Glenfall was hard up enough to resort to stealing, or that they would even if they were. Prices around town were so standardized that it seemed silly to bicker over the tiny variance that might exist from shop to shop. Even if there were occasional misunderstandings, her profit margin was large enough that it would hardly matter.

  “Is that something you can build?” she asked Allen.

  “Oh, Jane.” Bella pointed gleefully at the tinker. “Look at him. He’s already designing it in his head.”

  Allen shrugged sheepishly. “She’s not wrong. I think I’m actually going to start on it tonight, while I eat all this bread. I have a few hours of work left before that, though. What are you doing after this? Do you want to come see it?”

  “Maybe a bit later,” Jane told him. “I have something to do this afternoon, if people come to pick up their orders soon enough.”

  “Then I’ll see you if I see you.” He gave them another smile and a wave. “Later, you two.”

  Jane and Bella watched him go, and then Bella shook her head with a sigh.

  “Look at you both. You have almost everything worked out now, don’t you? And here I am still dilly-dallying with Brit. How did you get so far ahead, so fast?”

  “I don’t think either of us has anything really figured out yet. We are just treading water until we do.” Jane smiled at her friend. “You and Brit are an entirely different situation.”

  “Oh? How so?”

  “Well, for one, I don’t want to torture Allen for fun.”

  “It’s not really torture. It’s more…” Bella thought for a moment before wobbling her head in vague acceptance. “It might be torture, but it’s friendly enough, I think. And he seems to like it.”

  “Agreed. Like I said, an entirely different situation. Now help me clean up a bit. I don’t want to stay longer than I have to today, if I can help it.”

  An hour’s worth of work had the place spick and span. The next round of deliveries arrived while they were cleaning. The flour, oil, and eggs for the next day’s baking were soon put away, bringing the shop up to Jane’s exacting standards for baking-readiness.

  To Jane’s delight, most of the dinner holds also went out the door during that timeframe, carried away in hungry hands towards family dinners.

  “What about these last two?” Jane gave the remaining bundles a slightly frustrated look. One of them was the first dinner hold she had taken, and that woman had said she wouldn’t be coming back until the evening. “It’s sad that these two bundles will add two more hours to my day.”

  “Oh, we can just drop them off,” Bella replied. “That’s normal. I know where both of those families live, so it’s no trouble. Do you see what I mean about holds yet, though? Why they are so great?”

  “I admit I don’t. So far, they just feel like a bit more work.”

  “It’s like this. Anyone who puts in a dinner hold is including you in their plans for the day. Some of the people who bought cookies today might come back, or they might not. They could have just bought on impulse. But the dinner holds are all people who decided it would be more convenient to use you for something they had already planned. Most of those are going to be consistent customers.”

  “Wow,” Jane marveled. “Yes, I understand now. That’s great. Do you have the same sort of thing?”

  “Not quite. I have some standing orders I know to have ready at a given time, but I do a different kind of business.” Bella grinned. “The point is, your worries are over. So long as you keep your current quality up, you already have your customer base. That’s really good, Jane.”

  “Agreed!” Jane hefted the two remaining orders onto the counter. “Now point me in the right direction to drop these off. I want to get started on my other day’s work.”

  “You seem eager to do whatever that is. What’s the plan there?”

  “It’s hard to explain…”

  “There’s a trick for that. Just try to keep it down to one sentence.”

  Jane loaded a few needful things into her personal bag while she worked out the compact version of what she had to do. Luckily, Bella was about the only person with whom she could share even the smallest aspects of it.

  “I need to walk around the woods and look at magic things that only I can see.”

  Bella took one of the dinner hold bags from the counter. “Well, if that’s the case, you need me.”

  “I’m not sure you’d be as much help as you think, Bella.” Jane threw her own bag over her shoulder and picked up the second dinner hold. “I wasn’t kidding when I said I’m the only one who can see this kind of thing. Me and other archmages. It would be like you trying to tell me the color of things without having eyes.”

  “I understand that. But you don’t understand what walking through the woods is like. You are a city girl, right? Have you done a lot of wilderness hiking before?”

  “We took trips with guides when I was in the academy.”

  “Then your feet were set on easy paths, and you didn’t have any risk of getting lost. Those guides probably did their job well enough that you didn’t know it was happening, but I guarantee you it happened.” Bella strode towards the door. “Trust me. You need someone who knows what the woods around here are like, or you might get turned around. I’m sure you have a magical way to get found if that happens…”

  “I do.”

  “… but I’m also sure you don’t want to use it and make a big spectacle.” With another grin, she held the door open for Jane. “Plus, it’s fun girl time in the woods. Who doesn’t like fun girl time in the woods?”