A Measure of Happiness by Lorrie Thomson Read Free Book Online

that the way he saw himself?
    â€œStrangely enough,” Katherine said, “that’s kind of how I ended up here myself.”
    Two men entered the shop. Guys looked like they were in their thirties, wearing cookie-cutter suits, their shoulders hunched from desk work. While Celeste counted out change, the taller of the two guys bit into his blueberry muffin, and his shoulders notched down. “You’re the best,” the customer at the register told Celeste, and his buddy nodded, crumbs slipping from his grin.
    Probably the only joy in their day. They probably chewed slowly to delay getting to an office, where they crunched numbers in five-by-five cubicles inside square gray buildings. A box within a box would suffocate Zach.
    He’d rather dangle over Clarendon Street or sweat it out in a bakery kitchen.
    â€œSo . . . Katherine . . . you were on a road trip, traveling around the country, when you ended up in Hidden Harbor?”
    Katherine closed her eyes and shook her head. When she raised her gaze to him, she somehow managed to look both happy and sad. “I was a wanderer.”
    Chills prickled up the back of Zach’s head and across his shoulders. “All who wander are not lost,” he said, the same phrase he’d offered his mother in response to her complaint about his aimlessness.
    â€œI was,” Katherine said.
    â€œYou are,” Zach’s mother had said, her eyes shiny with tears.
    Katherine’s eyes were dry. “Oh, sure, I had a plan. Hit every state in New England, and then continue across the country. Free as a bird, until I took a job working here. I was going to stay a few months, one season in each locale.”
    â€œSo why’d you stay?”
    â€œI fell in love.”
    Zach imagined Katherine decades ago, the fine lines around her eyes erased, her hair down around her shoulders. He imagined a guy, his biological father, walking into the bakery and falling to his knees.
    â€œWhen?” Zach asked. “When did you fall in love?”
    Katherine inhaled and held her breath. For a second, her brow knit and her chin dimpled, and Zach thought she might apologize. He could practically see the words I’m sorry forming on her tongue. Then her features smoothed, unreadable. “Twenty-five years ago,” she said.
    Perfect timing.
    The conversations in the shop jumbled and blurred to a hum. Zach’s head spun with the sudden shift and the impossible sensation of movement. “What was his name?”
    â€œWho?” Katherine’s hand went to her cheek. “Oh! You thought. Ah, no. There was no man. I fell in love with this place. Hidden Harbor. Maine. Lamontagne’s.” She shook her head. “Only the bakery was called Hazel May’s, back in the day.”
    Katherine’s words and actions didn’t jibe, the sort of tells you looked for in a criminal investigation. She held her hand to her cheek, the way Zach’s mother touched her face after his father swooped in for a kiss. Every single night after work.
    How could a couple feel that way about each other after decades of marriage? Every secret revealed? Nothing left to learn?
    How could Katherine feel that way about a place where she worked?
    â€œYou found what you were looking for?” Zach said. “Working here?” Had Katherine chosen a bakery over a boy? A place over a person?
    Her heart was big enough to wrap around the entire state of Maine but too small to fit an infant?
    Too small to love him.
    He’d seen the way Katherine responded to Celeste, the girl trying to please the woman, the woman’s quick rebuff. He’d noticed how Celeste’s expression hinged on Katherine’s approval. He’d appreciated the girl’s attitude, sarcasm as defense.
    All these years Zach had thought the fault lay inside of him. That his birth mother had taken one look at him and deemed him unworthy of devotion. Or worse, that she’d decided