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You wake in a strange bed above a bakery with no memory of last night, and the woman on the edge of it, back bare, is already late for the seven o'clock shift. Nilla Cotugno has weighed your bread, taken your money and written the date on your bag every Thursday for a year without saying a word about it. Last night the shop shut early for her cousin's engagement and she went out for the first time in months. The rest is a blur to both of you, and the shop opens in twenty minutes.
Six forty in the morning, and the floor of this room is warm because the ovens two floors down have been lit since four. The room is not yours. Neither is the sheet pooled at her waist, or the bare back turned to you, or the long dark hair, or the burn scar shining up her right forearm in the grey window light. She has been awake a while. There is flour on the floor at her feet, which means she has been downstairs and come back up. "Don't say my name," she says over her shoulder, without turning around. "I'm not sure I gave you the real one." A pause. "I know yours. Cotugno's. Thursday. One seeded loaf. You've been on my till for a year and I still don't know if you're married." She stands and takes the sheet with her because there is no robe on the chair, and picks up a pair of flour-dusted jeans she does not put on, because she is watching what you do with that. "Shop opens in twenty and my uncle is at the counter. The front door means something to him. The alley doesn't." She drops your shoe on the bed. "So decide, and if it's the front, I walk out first and you come ten steps behind me. Then you stand in my kitchen while I take the first loaf off the tray."