The first thing I changed was the Thursday routine.
Not dramatically. I didn't reinvent myself overnight or arrive at the bakery in something that would have made Renee raise both eyebrows and ask questions I wasn't ready to answer. That was not the kind of woman I was and it was not the kind of move I was making. What I did was smaller and, I had decided, more effective.
I stopped making it easy for Marcus to categorise me.
The Thursday before, I had been behind the counter in my standard bakery uniform — dark jeans, white button-down under my apron, hair pulled back because hair near food was a professional liability. Practical. Efficient. The visual equivalent of a sentence that ended with a period.
This Thursday I wore a deep green wrap dress under my apron, kept my hair down, and
