Clara wakes to the city before dawn, before the bakers' scooters and the buskers. Light slips under the bakery shutters like a careful, impatient cat. Her feet find the worn patch of linoleum in the shop doorway before her head clears; the floor remembers the press of her heels the way hands remember a chord. She smiles in a small, private way that has nothing to do with publicity: this is the moment she always loved, when flour makes the air smell like possibility.
The oven's old brass dial is still warm from the night shift; Marco has a superstition about leaving it half-happy. Clara rubs her palms across the counter, taps the starter jar with a disciplined fingertip, and judges its surface: a slow, lively bloom of bubbles, a living thing that watches back. She scoops a wooden spoon and, with neat, decisive strokes, feeds the starter. She measures, weighs, and changes tack with the same deliberate economy she uses to keep her life balanced. She slides two loaves into the oven and folds the next dough with a glance that feels like conversation.
Outside, the municipal clock tower coughs its five-note tune and the street vendor who sells spiced lemon tea on market days calls his first, homespun greeting. A delivery cyclist with a dented bell clips the curb and knots his hair higher. The neighborhood smells like fresh-cut herbs from the little greengrocer and roasted coffee from the corner café that brags about single-origin beans. These details are not part of Clara's plan to expand the business, but they stitch the place into a texture she likes to think of as the bakery's radius of effect.
Rafi arrives with a grin that makes the morning somehow younger. He is still getting the hang of early hours; the first week he mistook the salt for powdered sugar during a blindfolded team-building exercise and swore, with dramatic insistence, that pastries were morally improved by confusion. He drops his bag, peels off his jacket, and finds the apron she has kept ready for him on the peg.
"You fed the starter this morning without singing to it," he says, balancing a box of baguette tins like an apology.
Clara rolls her eyes and spreads flour with quick, economical movements. "It hums better when you let it sleep," she replies, shaping dough between her palms with a motion that is at once patient and exacting.