Monday we baked anyway, because bread doesn't wait on anybody's bad week, and because I didn't know what else to offer Tess besides work that had a clear beginning and a clear end.
She came in on time, apron tied the same as always, and measured flour with hands that only shook once, when the five-pound bag slipped and she caught it against her hip instead of letting it fall.
"I don't know what he did," she said again, not looking up from the bowl. "I want you to know that. I've been asking myself all night and I don't have an answer."
"I believe you don't have an answer," I said, which was true and also, I noticed even as I said it, not quite the same thing as believing there was nothing to find.
We worked through the morning orders in a kind of truce with the silence, and I was glad for the oven heat, something to blame for why neither of us looked at the other too long.
Nolan came by at eleven, letter in hand before he'd even said hello, which told me everything about how the conversation was going to go.
"Leona." He held the envelope out like it might bite him. "I have to pause the renewal. Legal's telling me to hold everything until this settles."
"Settles how? Nobody's charged me with anything, Nolan. Nobody's charged this building with anything."
"I know that. I do. But I've got six other tenants in that strip asking me questions I can't answer, and I've got my own name on that lease too."
I took the envelope because there wasn't a version of refusing it that changed what was inside.
"What did he talk about," Nolan asked, lowering his voice like Tess might hear him through a closed door and a running mixer, "when he was here. Did he ever say anything, about work, about people he knew."
"He talked about his garden. He talked about the Red Sox. He brought us tomatoes in August and complained about the humidity like everybody else on this street." I heard my own voice getting tight. "I don't have a secret tape of Martin Vey confessing anything, Nolan, because there wasn't one to make."
"I'm not saying you do."
"You're asking like you think I might."
He didn't answer that, which was its own kind of answer, and he left with my unsigned lease still sitting between us like a third person in the room.
I went back inside and found Tess pulling trays, steady now, the shaking gone, and I didn't tell her about the pause yet. I told myself it was kindness. I'm less sure now that it wasn't cowardice dressed as kindness.
That night, alone in my own kitchen with the radio off out of some new habit, I made a list of everything I actually knew about Martin Vey, separate from everything I'd simply felt about him.
He'd lived on my street for six years. He'd fixed my fence post without being asked. He'd introduced me to Nolan. He'd never once, that I could swear to, said a word that sounded like anything but an ordinary man's ordinary complaints.
And that was the whole list. Six years of a person, and what I actually knew for fact filled four lines on a page, while what I'd assumed filled everything else, every warm evening, every tomato, every easy laugh I'd taken as proof of a man rather than as simply a man being pleasant.
I thought about Tess in the other room, measuring flour with shaking hands, and I understood for the first time how much weight I'd been letting a feeling carry that should have been carried by facts, and how little of that weight I actually had the right to.
I didn't sleep well. I kept hearing Nolan's voice asking what Martin talked about, and my own voice answering with tomatoes, and wondering if tomatoes were going to be enough to save anything.