Belle and the Beast profile line art with rose

The ovens were lit at four, and by half past the lane smelled of burnt sugar and wet slate, which is how I know the morning has started properly. You will laugh, but I have been baking rose-water buns again for the Tuesday rush, because old Mr Gresham at number nine asked for them the way other men ask for a blessing. I told him roses were fussy. He said the fussy things are the only ones worth keeping.

Tobias came up the cobbles with the flour sacks just as the sky went grey over the chimneys. He has those long curled horns from the goat farm his family kept, and he ducks under the lintel without looking, the way you duck an old argument. He set the sacks down and, without a word, laid a single red rose on my scale. It had been pressed in a book for years, the petals gone papery, yet one still had a little colour at its heart.

I told him he was daft. He told me the rose had been waiting on the windowsill since the flood and that he had only been waiting for the right morning to say so. Then a petal fell onto the flour, and he looked at it as though it were a letter he had been meaning to answer for years.

Come home at Easter. The bakery is yours to have whenever you want it, and I will leave the back door unlatched and a bun warm on the sill.

Your loving sister, Odile