“Yeah, I am,” Jack says. “I mean, I will be opening a bakery, if I can get everything sorted before the planned opening in two months. I’ve signed the lease, and I’ve secured the loan I need, but the renovations have been a nightmare. It hasn’t been easy doing it by myself.”

“You’ve been doing the entire thing by yourself?”

Jack nods. “There is so much boring business shit involved with starting a business. Which is quite unfortunate, because I get bored very easily. Plus, my finances are kind of fucked since I’ve cut back hours at Patty’s to spend more time getting the new place off the ground.”

“But you won’t accept help from any of the millionaires in your family because…?”

“Because!” Jack says, flicking the spoon. “Taking money from family is complicated.”

I turn to face her standing by the stove top, so solid, so grounded. “Is it because if you accept help from other people, then you wouldn’t be the strong, independent, self-sufficient Jack?”

“Because if I take my family’s money,” she corrects defensively, “it means I’m buying into their ideas about success and failure.”

“And if you take their money, and your business still doesn’t work out—”

“Then I’ll just prove to my dad that I’m the slacker fuck-up he thinks I am,” Jack finishes, mixing the peanut butter now in a rather violent fashion. Then she’s scraping the frosting off the sides of the stand-mixer bowl, then she’s roasting sesame seeds in a frying pan. She is somehow everywhere all at once, a blur throughout the kitchen, her brain on autopilot. She’s laser focused on each task, no part of her restless or fidgety.

Jack bakes like I draw, with all of herself. It’s sort of miraculous to watch. All that restless energy funneled into a beautiful purpose. “I’m going to tell you what you would tell me if our positions were reversed,” I say, watching her fly through each step in the baking process like it’s written in her bones. “Your bakery can’t fail.”

“Believe me, it can. It’s a very saturated market.”

“It can’t fail,” I say with more force, attempting to use Jack’s own words against her, “because even if it never turns a profit, and even if it closes within the first year, you tried. You took a damn risk. People who take bold risks to go after their dreams are never failures.”

“Shit.” Jack looks appalled. “Do I always sound like a cheesy motivational poster hanging in the office of an out-of-touch high school guidance counselor?”

“Literally always.”

Jack flashes me her full, goofy, infectious smile, and I feel like that is written on my bones. Her smile is stamped on every nerve ending in my body. Two hundred thousand dollars. I chant the words in my head. I’m here for two hundred thousand dollars.