"Long face today," Louise observed, setting her coin purse on the counter. "That Colton boy again?"
Ren blinked, surprised. "How did you know?"
"Honey, I taught mathematics in this county for 36 years. I know when a number doesn't add up. And I know when a young woman's carrying something heavier than she's letting on."
Louise counted out her change with the careful precision of someone who had graded a great many homework assignments in her life.
"That boy was in my classroom once, you know. 11 years old. Sharp enough when he wanted to be. But even then, he had a habit of finding the smallest kid in the room and figuring out exactly which words would make them cry the fastest."
"Doesn't surprise me."
"Nothing about people like that ever really does," Louise said. "The sad part is, nobody ever made him stop. Not his teachers, not his father. He learned real early that there wasn't a consequence in this town big enough to reach him."
She took her tea and her scone and paused at the door.
"Somebody ought to teach him different one of these days. Preferably somebody with the patience for it."
She left before Ren could answer, the bell over the door ringing once behind her. And Ren stood a long moment, with the last of the morning light slanting gold across the counter, thinking about numbers that didn't add up, and about a lesson that had been 20 years overdue.
The bakery closed at 2 on weekdays. Ren finished wiping down the counters, hung her apron, and checked the clock on the wall. 2:15.
The bus to Riverside Care Home left Main Street at 2:30. If she missed it, the next one wasn't for 90 minutes, and she didn't like to be late. Not on a day her grandmother was expecting her.
She walked the four blocks quickly, hands in her jacket pockets, one fist curled loosely around the trident charm.
The bus was already at the stop when she arrived, doors open, Earl behind the wheel again for the afternoon route.
"Afternoon, Ren," he said. And there was something gentler in his voice than there had been that morning. Like a man trying, in a small, clumsy way, to make up for something he hadn't been able to prevent.
"Afternoon, Earl."
She took a seat near the middle this time. Fewer people on the afternoon route. No sign of Grant or his friends, thankfully. Just a handful of regulars, tired after work, and an elderly woman two rows up knitting something long and blue.
Two rows ahead of her, a young woman named Norah Fenwick sat with one hand resting on the round curve of her stomach. Seven months along, a paperback baby name book open in her lap, even though she and her husband had already picked a name months ago.
Norah rode this route three times a week for checkups at the clinic near the care home, and she and Ren had built the kind of small, easy friendship that happens between two quiet people who ride the same bus often enough.
"How's Eleanor doing?" Norah asked, twisting around in her seat.