Grief led me to the kitchen long before I knew why. I wasn’t trying to become “the girl who baked pies for strangers.” I just needed my hands busy so my heart wouldn’t shatter.
It started the night everything changed. Sixteen, earbuds in, pretending homework mattered while my parents laughed at TV—then the smell of smoke cut through the music. My dad grabbed me by the arm, dragging me into the freezing January night. He went back for Mom and Grandpa. None of them came out. An electrical issue, they said later. But the fire didn’t just take them. It swallowed every memory—photos, savings, the little ceramic horse from my tenth birthday. I was the only thing left standing in the yard.
The youth shelter became my home: a dorm bed, two shared bathrooms, a common kitchen, and posted “quiet hours” in fading marker. My aunt Denise—my only relative—called once to say she had “no room” for me. She kept half the insurance payout for herself. I didn’t fight her. I didn’t fight anything. Numbness can look a lot like compliance.
By day, I studied like life depended on it. By night, I baked. Blueberry, apple, cherry, peach, strawberry-rhubarb—whatever my stipend and coupons allowed. I learned the weight of flour, the breath of butter, how a wine bottle could double as a rolling pin. Ten pies. Twenty pies. I boxed them, taped them shut, and walked them through the dark to shelters and hospices, never leaving a name, never waiting to see who ate them. Aunt Denise scolded anyway. “You’re wasting money,” she said. I hung up and kept kneading.
Two weeks after my eighteenth birthday, a cardboard box arrived at the youth center. Inside was a perfect pecan pie, braided edge, powdered sugar like first snow. Hidden in the crust was a note:
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