Daisy Dulac's Arc

Chapter 1 of 3

Daisy Dulac had matched half of Cabin Fever Ridge, but her own cabin stayed dark each night. She wanted one last thing before she hung up her satchel for good: to pair every lonely soul on her route. This morning she stood at the sorting bench and faced a problem she couldn't solve with stamps. She had no list of who was still single. Names blurred together after thirty years. Match the wrong two people, and she'd humiliate someone already spoken for. So she baked. She wrapped warm buttermilk biscuits in wax paper, three to a bundle, and tucked one into every mailbox. She wrote no note. She only watched. A married man would share the biscuits at his own table. A lonely one might linger, might come find the baker. It was a soft test, and no one would know they'd taken it. By noon she reached the last box on her route. It hung crooked on a post beside a sugar maple with a strange, twisted trunk. She reached to slip the bundle inside. A hand caught the door first. "Yours?" The voice was low. Cole Arnett stood there, broad in a faded flannel jacket, a gold ring swinging on a chain at his throat. She knew him only from the road, the ice trucker who drove north for weeks and came back to no one. He held up the biscuits. "Found these three days running. Figured somebody was testing me." Daisy's face went hot. "I meant no harm." "I know what you do, Daisy." He turned the wax paper in his hands, not angry, just tired. "You match folks. Half the town." His thumb brushed the ring on the chain. "I'm not one of your lonely ones to fix." She looked at the ring, then at his empty cabin behind him. "You wear it, but you sleep alone." He went quiet. The wind moved the maple leaves above them. "She's been gone four years," he said finally. "Doesn't make me single. Makes me done." Daisy nodded slowly. She saw it now. Her biscuits couldn't tell the difference between a man with no one and a man who wanted no one. Her whole plan had a hole in it as wide as this one crooked box. "I'll take them back," she said, reaching for the bundle. "Keep them." He pressed the biscuits into her ink-stained hands. "But do me a kindness. Don't guess at people from a mailbox." He climbed into his rig and pulled the door shut. Daisy walked home with the last bundle uneaten. Cole was right. A biscuit told her who ate alone. It couldn't tell her who wanted company and who only wanted to be left be. Her test had failed her at the first hard case. If she meant to finish her route, she needed to know each heart before she matched it. And there was only one way to learn a heart. She had to ask.