Chapter 4: Every Pastry

He came on a Thursday, at six in the morning, when the first tray of rolls was still too hot to touch.

The bell over the door rang.

I looked up from the counter with my hands full of paper bags.

Luca Corvino stood in the doorway of a bakery on Kastanienallee in a black overcoat, with the grey Berlin dawn behind him.

The line of construction workers and students and mothers with strollers went quiet.

Even here, people knew what he was just by looking.

He didn't take his eyes off me.

He walked to the front of the line.

A man in a paint-spattered jacket said, "Hey, there's a queue."

Luca looked at him.

The man found something interesting on the floor.

"Klara," Luca said.

"You're cutting the line."

"I flew eight hours."

"Then you can wait eight minutes. Back of the line."

He stood there.

Behind me, my boss stopped scraping the bench.

I turned to the next customer, a tired woman with a baby on her hip, and said in German, "What can I get you?"

She glanced at Luca.

"Two Schrippen," she said. "And whatever he's having, apparently."

The line laughed.

Luca walked to the back of it.

He waited behind a student with headphones and a toddler who stared at his shoes.

I served every single person ahead of him.

I took my time.

When he got to the counter, he put both hands flat on it.

His wedding ring finger was bare.

Of course it was.

The wedding wasn't till May.

"I'll take everything," he said.

"What?"

"Everything in the case. All of it."

"There are forty pastries in that case."

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