“Be sure to say hi to Lilac for me,” her mom said, talking as Gram took a seat with them at one of the tables. “I’m glad we get a rare moment to sit down together, but I must admit you’ve got my nerves up.”

Tessa took a sip of Gram’s wonderful coffee, licking the foam off her lips and gearing up for what she had to say. She had a sinking feeling that any sentence she’d utter with the word Castorini in it was destined to create a volcanic eruption. But she plunged in anyway. “So…” she began, “I’ve been trying to get us new accounts to replace the GoodFoods chain pulling out.”

“Yes,” her mom said. “I have, too. I had a couple of leads as far as Illinois and Michigan, if we could hire the transport so the bread arrives fresh.”

“Well, that might not be necessary. I found a potential local customer.” Really local. “No transport required.”

“Is it a chain?” her grandmother asked. “We’ll need more than one store.”

“Not a chain.” Tessa had to remind herself to breathe. Dread prickled the back of her neck. “It’s a family-owned restaurant. The son is planning to go into business with his father, and he wants to use our bread. They…would like some desserts, too, which I’m happy to work evenings to make.” She took another deep breath. “And…I’d like to do a shelf of pastries here. Just a tiny shelf, to see if they’d be popular. If they are, well—maybe we could sell those, too. Diversify our inventory. And maybe start selling them to our other accounts?”

There. She’d said it. All of it.

Her mother gave her a shrewd look. “Which restaurant?”

Well, okay, almost all of it.

“It’s very well established, and—”

“Tessa, who?”

She waved her hand toward next door. “Our, um…neighbors.”

“Out of the question,” her mother said, bringing her hand down hard on the table. “We are a boulangerie. Not a patisserie. I’ve been telling you that for a long time. We’re not having this discussion again.”

Tessa bit the insides of her cheeks to keep from saying something she’d regret. It was the same spiel she’d heard dozens of times before, and it was usually amended with, “But that doesn’t mean you can’t go out and become a patisserie chef somewhere else.”

But this time her mother added, “And we do not supply Italian restaurants—especially not that family’s Italian restaurant—with our French bread. That’s just absurd.”

Again, Tessa caught her grandmother’s eye. Gram knew that Tessa was too faithful to ever leave her family during a time of need, because family loyalty was baked into her DNA.

“You know, Joanna,” Gram said, “these are desperate times. Maybe we need to change our way of thinking.”