Ellie Monroe's Arc

Chapter 5 of 5

Morning light filled Chris's little lakeside cabin. Ellie sat at the borrowed desk, her new notebook open, when a knock rattled the front door. Chris answered it. A woman stood on the porch, hair tied back, flour dusting her apron. She ran the bakery in town, she said, and her business was dying. "Nobody knows we're open," she told Chris. "I can't pay you. But I bake every day. Fix my sign, help me pull in customers, and you'll eat free for a year." Chris rubbed his jaw and glanced at Ellie. "Signs and customers aren't my trade," he said. "But I know someone who did that for a living." Ellie's stomach dropped. She'd spent twenty years selling things she didn't care about. This was different. This was a real person, one broken sign, and a trade she could turn into cash for her roof. "I can help," she said. "But I need a place to work. Paper, a flat table, room to draw." They both looked around the cabin. The desk was tiny. The kitchen table wobbled. There was nowhere. "My place, then," the baker said. "Back room's empty." Chris shook his head. "Too far. You'll want to test the sign here, by daylight, near the tools." He stood and cleared the workbench under the front window with one arm. Chisels and nails clattered into a bucket. "There. Flat and wide. Ellie draws, I build." Elli looked at the cleared bench, then at him. He'd made her a workspace in ten seconds. She spread her notebook flat. "Bring me your old sign," she told the baker. "And tell me what makes your bread worth the walk." The woman talked. Ellie listened and sketched. She wrote three words in thick letters: WARM BREAD DAILY. Simple. Honest. The kind of line that stopped a hungry person cold. Chris cut a fresh board and sanded it smooth. Their hands kept brushing over the wood. "You're fast," he said, watching her letters take shape. "You're faster." She dipped her brush. A drop of paint landed on his knuckle. She wiped it with her thumb before she thought about it. He didn't pull away. By afternoon the sign hung finished, red letters on pale pine. The baker pressed folded bills into Ellie's hand. "For the paint and your time. It's not much." Ellie counted it. Not the roof. But the first real money she'd earned out here. "It's a start," she said. When the baker left, Chris leaned against the bench beside Ellie. Close. "Word travels in this town," he said. "You fix one sign, everybody wants one." Ellie laughed. Then she stopped. If everybody wanted one, she'd need to work fast, and she had exactly one wobbling bench in a cabin that wasn't hers. The roof clock was still ticking. She had a trade now, and no real place to run it.