Chapter One
Christopher
To Christopher Calloway, the best things about Christmas are usually building the gingerbread house, making a wish at midnight, diving back into one of his favourite children’s fantasy novels, and eating as much as is physically possible.
This year, though, the thing he is most looking forward to is a break.
An actual break.
Well, and the gingerbread house.No matter what happens, he willalwayswant to build the gingerbread house.
Tomorrow, he’ll be in York with his sister, Kit, and her girlfriend, Haf, who happens to also be his best friend, for a very restful, do-nothing-eat-lots Christmas break.
He needs it.He’s exhausted.When he worked in his less-effort-than-it-looked finance job, everyone clocked off early at Christmas, the last few days spent physically there, but mentally checked out.Usually thinking of new things to bake, if he’s honest, while moving his mousejustoften enough that his computer didn’t go to sleep.Now that he actuallyownshis dream bakery, he doesn’t miss those soulless days, but he does miss how tired hewasn’t.
And although part of him feels a little bad for closing up on 20th December, he needs the rest.
‘Need me to do anything else?’asks Tegan, his teenage shop assistant, who has already hung up her apron and is reaching for her bag in a way that suggests she doesn’t want him to say yes.
There really isn’t anything else for her to do.They’ve not had a customer in over an hour.It may only be 20th December, but it feels as if the world is shutting down for the holidays already.Maybe things just stop earlier in this little town.He’s still running on London time.
The bakery has been busy all morning with customers collecting orders of Christmas puddings and a few marzipan-topped boozy Christmas cakes, and buying fresh bread and pastries.Christmas makes people want fancy bread, it seems.It might be the most loaves he’s sold in a day ever.But now ...nothing.
Tegan had cleaned basically every inch of the café side of the bakery.If anything, she’d gone above and beyond.There really isn’t anything else for either of them to do.He may as well let her go home early.
‘No, go ahead.Thank you, Tegan.Merry Christmas,’ he calls after her as she darts out the door with a ‘Nadolig llawen!’
He regrets letting her go after a minute.Time goes much slower when you’re desperate to close up but have hours to goandare now on your own.Not that he and Tegan have particularly in-depth conversations, seeing as she’s a teenage Goth who barely tolerates him, even though he’s her employer.The company is nice though.
There are a few Christmas puddings awaiting collection, plus a few more loaves and biscuits to sell if he can.Plus, the bakery is normally open until five.
At least the one thing he won’t have to worry about is the bakery over Christmas.Kit had suggested he offer it up as a holiday let in case anyone local had family coming in from out of town.After all those window displays and buying an entirely new business, his bank balance was looking a bit ...slim.Luckily, it was quickly snapped up by someone coming over from America.He’s written up a very thorough handover document about staying in the flat, so all he needs to do tomorrow morning is give them the keys, show them round, and head to the train station.
In want of a task that isn’t clock-watching, Christopher wipes down the counter for possibly the twentieth time that day.At least something is happening, even if it’s potentially damaging the already battered wood.
He probably should have saved making treats for his family for this lull, but he finished them yesterday – a Christmas pudding, of course, but also shortbread stars to hang on the tree, some gingerbread (not in house form, for ease of transport), and little bags of peppermint candies, sea-salt fudge and chocolate truffles.The last three hadn’t even been part of the plan – they were what he’d whipped up in the very early hours of this morning when he was too wide awakenotto make a sweet shop’s worth of treats.Hopefully, he can pack them all into his suitcase for the train journey, but if he ends up with spillover tote bags at least he can bribe anyone he ends up squishing with some sweets.
Three hours.Three hours and then he can lock the door, be done for Christmas and the whole of this intense year.He’s never been so excited to check out mentally.
But there are still three hours to go, so wiping the counters it is.
* * *
It doesn’t help his sense of time that the last year has gone by at two very different speeds – horrifyingly fast, and drudgingly slow.
It had all started last Christmas.For reasons he is admittedly a little embarrassed about now, he’d spent the holidays in his family home with a fake girlfriend, Haf, in a hare-brained scheme to deflect any questions about him potentially taking over his father’s business, and to avoid being set up with anyone else.Naturally, the course of terrible schemes and fake romance never did run smooth.For a start, Haf fell in love with his sister, Kit, in a matter of days, which is totally preposterous.And then Christopherrejected a job from his dad at the Christmas dinner table.On the drive home, he had instead started to form his own plan for a very different future.
Barely a month later, he had jacked in his fiscally sensible but soul-destroying job and was studying ‘Pâtisserie and Boulangerie’ at the most prestigious cooking school in the country.Six months of full-time kitchen life, covering everything from the foundations of breadmaking all the way up to fiddly and complex molecular gastronomy, surrounded by other hungry people determined to work in kitchens around the world.There was really nothing like it.It was the happiest – and busiest – time of his life.
And then, it was over, so suddenly – frankly, it’s no wonder his sense of time is entirely warped now – but he wasn’t ready to slow down; hecouldn’t.While he was looking for jobs, he had offhandedly mentioned to Haf and Kit that really, what he wanted was his own kitchen.This somehow made its way to Haf’s mum, Mari, who mentioned the bakery a few towns down from her on the North Welsh coast, which stood empty.He should come and look at Pantri Bach, they had said.Someone needed to reopen it.
It was silly to even consider it.And yet, the thought keptnaggingat him.
It made sense to just look it up, he decided.
Looking it up quickly turned to driving up to view it in person with Kit and Haf.The town, Pen-y-Môr, was so close to the sea that he couldn’t believe it.He’d grown up in the landlocked Cotswolds and lived in London for so long that he couldn’t imagine a town could be literally on the seafront.It was small, perhaps smaller than he originally imagined, with one long high street running from the sea up to the coastal mountains that crowded in at the back of the town.It was probably only a little larger than Oxlea, where he grew up, a few thousand people clustered together.But he liked that idea: the intentional intimacy as opposed to the anonymity of London.After all, the biggest towns nearby wereeither Llandudno or Bangor, still significantly smaller than London.Living here carried the prospect of a whole new way of life.
When he got to the bakery, it was clear the insides needed more than a lick of paint, but the estate agent insisted the recently serviced kitchen with all the equipment was included in the price.Upstairs was a tiny little run-down flat he could live in, with views of the sea and the mountains.Even his architect sister agreed it looked as if it had good bones, despite the peeling wallpaper and holey walls where pictures had been taken down.With some cosmetic fixes, some new furniture in, café side, and a decent coffee machine, it could be something totally new.Something that belonged to him.
