The bakery smelled exactly the same. That was the first betrayal. Nora had prepared herself for change — for the particular sadness of a place that had moved on without her — and instead she walked through the back door into a wall of warm sugar and cardamom that hit her somewhere between the sternum and the throat and refused to move.
Her mother was at the counter, writing numbers in a notebook with the focused expression of a woman who did not yet know she was being watched. Sixty-one years old and still the same: short, relentless, with flour on the cuff of a sleeve that would not accept that it was already ruined.
"You're late," her mother said without looking up.
"My flight was delayed."
"Your flight was fine. I checked." She closed the notebook. "You sat in the parking lot for twenty minutes."
Nora put her bag down. There was no point in denying it. Her mother had always been able to read parking-lot hesitation from the inside of a building. It was a specific and terrifying skill.
"I wasn't ready," Nora said.
Her mother looked at her for a long moment, then pushed a still-warm cinnamon roll across the counter.
"Ready is overrated," she said. "Eat something. We have a lot of work to do."