I waited until the last tray was in and the oven light had steadied before I said it, because some things are easier to say to someone whose hands are busy. "We have eleven weeks of rent left in the account. Maybe twelve if the Harwell order holds." Tess didn't look up from the dough she was folding. "You've known that a while." It wasn't a question.
"Since September," I said. "I didn't want you making decisions about your father's mess on top of worrying about your paycheck." She set the dough down then, flour to her wrists, and looked at me with an expression I couldn't call angry, more like someone recalculating a sum they'd trusted somebody else to do correctly. "That's not protecting me, Leona. That's deciding for me what I'm allowed to be scared about."
I didn't have a good answer, so I gave her the real one instead. "You're right. I'm sorry." I pulled the folder from under the register, the one with the bank statements and the lease quotes, and spread it across the flour-dusted table between us like a hand of cards finally turned face up.
Daywheel's counteroffer had come that morning: not an extension of our five-hour slot, but four predawn hours, five days a week, on a different oven station in the same shared kitchen. No storefront, no walk-ins, and less storage than we had now. The caterer needed our old hours. A new eight-hundred-dollar deposit would secure the smaller slot before our November term ended. I put the two schedules side by side so Tess could see exactly what we'd lose.
“The van,” I said. “Our parking permission ends with this agreement anyway. I can sell it, cover the deposit, and bank three months of reduced kitchen rent. But we stop promising delivery. Harwell already collects; the diner would have to collect too.” Tess reached for the phone before I could make that sound settled. We called the diner together. Friday pickup was possible, the manager said, but fewer rolls. I changed the order while he was still on the line.
Tess checked the totals herself. “Getting us here? Flour? Repairs?” We added bus fares, supplier delivery charges, ingredients, and reduced wages below the rent reserve instead of pretending three months' rent meant three months of everything. One account dropping would still hurt. “Three months isn't long,” she said. “No.” She tapped the smaller production total. “Then this is the ceiling until the receipts say otherwise.” I crossed out the extra Thursday run I'd penciled in.
She was quiet long enough that I started rehearsing what I'd say if she walked out, if she decided this was one risk too many stacked onto a year that had already cost her a father and a name people said carefully in her presence now, like it might detonate. Instead she asked, "What's my cut look like at reduced hours?" I told her the number, lower than she was making now, lower than either of us wanted to say out loud.
"Fine," she said, and the word came out even, not resigned exactly, more like a door closing on a decision rather than a feeling. "But I want to see the books every week. Not when something's wrong. Every week, whether it's good news or not." "Every week," I said. "I mean it, Leona." "I know you do. That's why I'm agreeing to it before you finish asking."
We shook on it over the flour, which felt almost comically formal for two women who'd been elbow to elbow in a kitchen for two years, but it mattered, the handshake, the way signing something matters even when you trust the other party completely. I'd sell the van Thursday. I already knew who'd buy it; Dale Pruner had been asking about it since spring.
What I didn't say, because I didn't yet have the shape of it myself, was how strange it felt to lose the van and call it a bargain, to measure success now in three months of runway instead of a lease on a street with a window, and how much lighter the folder felt once Tess had read every page of it instead of just the summary I'd been offering her like a kindness that was really a withholding.