July in New York was its own kind of test.
The heat came down hard and personal — not the polite warmth of May or the tentative promise of June but the full committed weight of a summer that had decided to make itself known. The city sweated and complained and kept moving because that was what it did, because stopping was not in the operational vocabulary of a place that ran on ambition and caffeine and the specific stubbornness of eight million people who had decided this was where they belonged regardless of the temperature.
I ran both bakeries in the heat and made cold things alongside the warm things and drank approximately twice as much water as was probably necessary and was, by every observable measure, fine.
Actually fine.
The real kind.
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The wedding was ten weeks away.
I
