Birdie turned her face toward him and sent him a smile. “Daisies! How nice.”

She still made no move to rise. Patrick crossed to the other side of the room, where they kept a pitcher filled with water from the pump that served everyone in the building. On the way, he noticed the cake his mother had brought home from the bakery. It looked like a basket. The bottom half used interlocking strands of chocolate frosting to look like wicker, and real strawberries were mounded atop the cake. If he didn’t know better, he’d have mistaken it for a genuine basket of strawberries.

“Those cakes sold out before I even finished them,” she said with pride.

Birdie O’Neill’s cakes made the Gerald Bakery famous. Crowds of people came to the bakery window each day to admire her whimsical creations. Sometimes they were towering layer cakes built to resemble city landmarks like Grand Central Station or St. Patrick’s Cathedral. Other times she imitated the natural world, like this strawberry basket cake. Once or twice a week, she brought a cake home to share with the neighbors. It made them one of the most popular renters in the building.

“Nice cake,” he said, picking out a ripe strawberry and popping it in his mouth.

Birdie still hadn’t gotten up from the sofa, and there was nothing on the stove for dinner. That was odd. She usually took great pride as a housekeeper. Her day started at four o’clock each morning when she headed to the bakery to start the ovens, and she finished by early afternoon, which left her plenty of time to prepare dinner. Their apartment usually smelled like heaven when he arrived home.

“What’s wrong?” he asked, since she wasn’t the sort to complain.

“I fell while lugging in a sack of flour from the wagon this morning,” she said. “It was dark, and I slipped on a loose brick.”

He closed the distance between them and hunkered down before her. “And you worked the rest of the day?”

“Don’t worry, it was nothing,” she teased while pinching his cheek. He didn’t complain. He’d finally persuaded her to stop pinching his cheek in public, but he didn’t have the heart to ask her to quit at home. “The pain went away for a while, but now it’s bad again.” She had a bandage on her forearm too.

“Did that happen when you fell?” he asked with a nod at the bandage.

“I scraped the wagon wheel on my way down. It’s nothing. Mr. Gerald patched it up as soon as I got inside.”

“Mr. Gerald ought to lug his own sacks of flour.”

“Don’t be taking that tone,” she said. “Mr. Gerald is a fine man who has always treated me well.”