Chapter One
The Day the Queue Got Long
Amara noticed the day precisely, because bakers notice mornings. It was a Tuesday in October, nothing special on the trays, and at six fifty she unlocked the front door of Amara's Ovens and the queue outside was eleven people long.
Eleven. She had opened three years earlier to a queue of her mother and a man who thought the shop was still a dry cleaner. She had survived the first winter on sourdough stubbornness and a second mortgage, and somewhere in year two the neighbourhood had decided about her, the way neighbourhoods decide, and now it was a Tuesday and the queue was eleven deep before opening, and by Saturday it bent round the corner past the pharmacy, and the pharmacist mentioned it, twice, with a smile that had paperwork behind it.
Let us stand with Amara in her doorway and name what she is actually looking at, because it is the hinge of this whole book, and almost every founder misreads it.
