Bread & Grudges

The sign above Bannock & Byre had hung crooked since the September storms two winters ago, the right corner dipping a little further every year, like the shop itself was giving a slow, tired bow. Nate’s father had put it up himself, years ago, on a rickety ladder, humming the whole time in a way Nate could still hear if he let himself. He had asked his mother, more than once, whether they might get it fixed before this year’s competition. Her answer was always the same, said in a tone which meant, in her mind, the matter was settled.

            It’s character, Nathaniel.

            Nate had learned it wasn't about money. Knowing how much his mother detested openly showing her feelings, he had learned not to push it. Margaret Bannock did not discuss his father. Not the sign, not the quiet ache of every morning or the amount of wasted coffee in a mug that would never be drunk from. Three years have passed and it was still easier, somehow, for both of them to bicker about uneven signs than to say anything aloud.

            He loved his family’s bakery. That was never in doubt. The smell of it at five in the morning, flour dust caught in the light as it squeezed through the windows. None of this wore him down. It was the repetitiveness of the recipes, the unchangeable layout, the till that was probably older than he was, and the sign. God forbid even the suggestion of changing the sign.

            Two streets over, past the butcher’s, past the old mine memorial with its wooden wheelbarrow swaying in the wind, Freya Bloom was halfway through shaping sourdough when her phone buzzed. Her mother. Always her mother, always at exactly the moment Freya’s hands were covered in dough.

            ‘Just checking you’re not letting standards slip, pet,’ Bridie said, the same way she always did, as though Freya might have quietly decided overnight to stop caring.

            ‘Morning to you too, Mum,’ Freya said, as she cradled the phone against her shoulder, not bothered to mention she’d been up since four.

            ‘Those Bannock lot would love nothing more than to watch a Bloom stumble.’

            Freya glanced out the kitchen window towards the crooked sign. She’d never actually spoken to any of them. Couldn’t even place a face to the name beyond vague village encounters. But her mother said it like gospel, like it was fact etched into the very stones of Dunmorrach.

            ‘Mum, they probably don’t think about us at all.’

            ‘Exactly the kind of thinking that gets you beaten,’ her mother said, not unkindly. It was just how she was.

            Freya didn’t really believe that, but she’d never spoken to a Bannock long enough to know if it was true. Thirty-three years old, and if you asked her what Nate Bannock looked like, she’d say tall and skinny. Which could count for half the village. But that was the rule in Dunmorrach: a Bloom did not speak to a Bannock. Not for small talk, not for awkward interactions while queued at the same butcher’s counter. Three generations back, the village had a single bakery called Whitfield. But nobody in either family dared to utter that word. It was simply the way of it, and she never dared to question it further.

            If you asked anyone in the village how the feud started, you'd get around six different answers, each told with complete confidence. None of them agreed with each other, but they all arrived at the same sacred object: the book.

            The recipe book, depending on who was telling it, had been leather-bound, handed down five generations, and had contained that one recipe. A seed loaf, according to Nate’s grandmother; a particular shortbread, according to half the parish council; ‘a bridie so good it once made a travelling salesman weep,’ according to old Hamish at the Coalstone, though Hamish also maintained he’d once seen the kelpie statue turn its head, so his testimony could be taken with a pinch of salt. Generations back, one member of the family had vanished into the night with the book clutched to their chest. Or, in Nate’s grandfather's considerably less dramatic version, had simply borrowed it for a Sunday roast and never quite got round to giving it back.

            Nobody alive had ever seen this book. Nobody could name a single dish, from either bakery, that traced back to it. It did not stop the whole of Dunmorrach from speaking about it as though it sat in a locked box somewhere, waiting to be reclaimed by whichever family finally proved themselves worthy. A status that would, this year, be settled once and for all by who won a village bake-off.

            This year had an edge; in a way the others hadn’t. For the first time in either family’s living memory, both shops were being run entirely by the two people destined to inherit them. Not a parent hovering by the till, not a grandparent doing the books in the back room, but Nate himself, freshly and terrifyingly in sole charge, and Freya, exactly as new to it, exactly as watched.

            The competition was six weeks away, same weekend it had always been, same marquee going up on the village green, same three judges who took the whole business a good deal more seriously than a scone strictly warranted. Most years, it passed pleasantly enough. A ribbon, a photo for the parish newsletter, nobody outside Dunmorrach ever the wiser. This year, without anyone needing to say it out loud, everybody understood it would be something else. The year the torch passed. The year the town would finally decide, out loud and in public, whether a Bannock or a Bloom actually deserved to hold it.

            Nate’s mother had mentioned the competition four times already this week, in the tone of someone stating settled fact rather than opinion. People are watching, love. More than usual. He didn’t ask what, precisely, she meant by more than usual. Whether it was simply the stakes of the year, or something closer to the quiet unstated hope that a win might finally settle something for her that had nothing to do with bread at all.

            Six weeks. One green. Two bakeries. A book that had almost certainly never existed, in the form the town insisted it had and a feud that neither Nate or Freya had started, and as far as either of them could presently imagine, had absolutely no idea how to end.

***

The storm arrived on a Tuesday which felt, to Nate, exactly the kind of small unfairness Dunmorrach specialised in. Not a Saturday when the bakery could reasonably close early. A Tuesday, mid-afternoon, with a full tray of oatcakes in the oven and a wedding order for Friday only half begun.

            The lights went first, a single flat clunk that took the whole street with it. Bannock & Byre, the butcher’s, the newsagent, the memorial’s floodlight, all gone at once, leaving the wheelbarrow looking, for the first time in Nate’s memory, faintly sinister rather than merely damp. Then the generator behind the counter, which was older than Nate and had never once been asked to do anything more strenuous than power the till, gave a single apologetic whirr and died as well.

            Nate stood in the sudden grey hush of his own shop and did the math. Half a wedding order, rising dough that wouldn’t hold its rise much past the hour, and a power cut the radio was already calling it the worst since records began, which was the sort of phrase Dunmorrach’s local radio announced roughly twice a year with equal conviction each time. There was, as far as he knew, exactly one working generator left on the whole street.

            He stood in his own doorway for a long moment, jacket half on, arguing with himself in a manner he would later be too proud to fully admit to. Then he thought about the wedding order, and his mother’s voice saying people are watching, love and set off down the back lane before he could talk himself out of it.

            Crumb & Co’s back door was propped open with a bag of flour, light spilling out warm and steady into the wet dark of the lane. Irritating proof that whoever had installed Freya’s generator had clearly thought about it in advance, in the way someone who was good at things Nate had never once considered. Freya looked up from a tray of something intricate. Tall, skinny, flour dust in his dark hair. Yeah that was a Bannock. She did not, to her enormous credit, immediately close the door in his face.

            ‘Bannock,’ she said, in the tone of a rumour she’d rather not have had confirmed.

            ‘Bloom.’ He held up the tray in his arms like evidence for a trial he hadn’t been told he was standing. ‘Wedding order. Won’t hold in this cold. I don’t suppose…’

            ‘You want my generator.’

            ‘I want your generator.’

            There was a silence long enough that Nate had time to fully picture himself explaining this exact moment to his mother, and to regret every choice that had led him here.

            ‘Fine,’ Freya said, at last, stepping back from the door with the particular grace of someone doing you an enormous favour and wanting you to know it. ‘Back corner. Don’t touch anything.’

            He didn’t touch anything. He stood very carefully in the back corner of the kitchen he had never once set foot in, in twenty-eight years of actively avoiding it, and did not touch anything for what felt like a genuinely heroic length of time. The silence between them lasted almost ten minutes before Nate, who was reliably terrible at small talk with people he didn’t already know, broke it in the only way he knew how. By asking about the thing directly in front of him.

            ‘What’s that?’ Not really a question. More an admission that he’d been failing not to look at it since he arrived.

            Freya glanced up, wary. ‘A cardamom and brown-butter bake. Working on the ratio.’

            ‘Ratio.’

            ‘I weigh things,’ she said, a little defensively, as though weighing things were an accusation someone had once levelled at her and she’d never fully recovered from it. ‘Precisely. It’s not… it doesn’t have to look chaotic to be good.’

            ‘I didn’t say chaotic.’

            ‘You were thinking it.’

            He hadn’t been, actually, though he found, watching her work, quick, exact, entirely certain of her own hands in a way he privately envied, that he could see exactly why someone might assume otherwise from the outside. It didn’t look careful. It looked like it shouldn’t work. But it did.

            ‘I’m not going to steal it,’ she added, catching him a beat too long, ‘if that’s what you’re doing. Standing there. Looking. That’s meant to be your family’s job, remember.’

            It took him a second to place the joke. The book, the ancient, unverifiable legend neither of them had ever actually believed a word of. When he did, something in his chest loosened slightly, involuntarily, the way it hadn’t in front of a Bloom in his entire adult life.

            ‘To be fair,’ he said, ‘nobody in my family’s ever actually seen it. We just nod along at Christmas.’

            ‘Mine too.’ A small, surprised laugh, gone almost as soon as it arrived, as though she’d caught herself doing something she hadn’t given herself permission for. ‘My gran swears it was a shortbread recipe. My mum thinks it’s a scone. Nobody’s ever asked what happens if we win the whole thing and it turns out there was never a book at all.’

            ‘Terrifying thought. Two families with nothing left to fight about.’

            ‘Might have to take up curling instead.’

            It went on like that, longer than either of them probably intended. An argument that thawed, almost without either of them noticing the exact moment it happened, into something closer to conversation. He told her, with more detail than necessary, about the wedding order and the specific way his mother liked the oatcakes stacked for delivery. She told him, reluctantly, at first and then not reluctantly at all, about the temperature she’d finally landed on for the cardamom bake, and the four failed attempts it had taken to get there.

            By the time the lights flickered back on down the street, his own shop’s window glowing dimly through the rain, visible even from Crumb & Co’s back door, neither of them had quite noticed how much time had passed. Or how comfortable the silence between them had become or the small, unfamiliar warmth of standing in someone else’s kitchen and feeling, for the first time in either of their lives, almost welcome there.

            ‘You’ll want your tray back,’ Freya said, a little too quickly, once she noticed the lights too.

            ‘Right. Yes.’ Nate gathered it up, suddenly awkward again in the specific way he only ever was around people he was, against every instinct he owned, starting to like. ‘Thank you. For the… all of it.’

            ‘Don’t make it weird, Bannock.’

            ‘Wouldn’t dream of it, Bloom.’

            He was most of the way back down the lane, tray balanced carefully against the rain, before he let himself smile about it.

***

For three days after the storm, Nate found himself doing something he hadn’t done in years: taking the long way to the butcher’s, past Crumb & Co’s window, at exactly the hour he suspected, though he’d never have admitted to timing it, that Freya was icing something in full view of the street. He didn’t go in. He didn’t wave. He simply walked past a little slower than the errand required, and told himself it was coincidence each time, and each time believed himself slightly less. His mother noticed before he did.

            ‘You’ve a face on you,’ she said, on Thursday, elbow-deep in the till and not looking up. ‘Like a man who’s had an idea he’s not sure he’s allowed to have.’

            ‘I don’t know what you mean.’

            ‘Mm.’ She straightened, wiped her hands on her apron, and gave him the look she’d been giving him since he was seven years old and had once tried to hide a broken window behind the flour sacks. ‘This wouldn’t have anything to do with a certain generator, would it? Story’s already round the village. Nate Bannock, stood in Freya Bloom’s kitchen for the best part of an hour.’

            ‘It was a power cut. I had a wedding order.’

            ‘I’m sure that’s exactly what it was.’ She turned back to the till, satisfied, in the maddening way of a mother who has decided not to press a point precisely because she knows it will do more work left alone. ‘Just…be careful, love. That’s all I’ll say. Whatever happened in that kitchen, her family’s still her family, same as ours is ours. People get hurt when that gets forgotten. On both sides.’       

            It wasn’t unkind. That was the trouble of it. Nate had spent his whole life being handed his mother’s opinions wrapped in enough genuine care that they were nearly impossible to argue with and this was no different. A warning that sounded, on the surface, entirely reasonable, and left him, underneath it, faintly ashamed of something he couldn’t quite name.

            So, when she pressed further that evening, is there something going on I should know about, Nathaniel, he did the thing people do when they are cornered by someone they love and not ready to examine their own feelings out loud. He talked himself down instead of up.

            ‘There’s nothing going on. It was one conversation. She’s… look she’s fine, she’s clearly good at what she does, but it’s not like there’s anything there. It’s not like I’m about to start baking scones with a Bloom.’ A short dismissive laugh, aimed at making his mother feel better rather than being strictly true. ‘It was one afternoon. It doesn’t mean anything.’

            He didn’t know, saying it, that the back door had been left ajar behind him, the way it always was on a mild evening. Or that Freya, dropping off a jar of preserves for his mother as a thank-you neither of them had quite worked out how to phrase properly, had arrived at exactly the wrong moment to hear exactly the wrong sentence. She didn’t go in. She stood very still in the lane for a moment, jar in hand, and then turned around and walked home without leaving the jar.

Nate didn’t find out what had happened for two days, mostly because there was nothing, from where he was standing, to find out. Freya simply stopped. She stopped being at her window when he walked past. She stopped, on the one occasion their paths did cross at the post office, doing nothing more than a short, tight nod that gave him nothing at all to work with. When he tried, clumsily, to say something about the wedding order going well, thanks to her generator, she said good in a tone that closed the conversation rather than continued it and walked on before he’d finished the sentence.

            He turned it over for days, in the specific useless way of someone replaying conversation for clues it doesn’t actually contain. Had he said something, in the kitchen, that had landed wrong once she’d had time to think it over? Had one of the old rules simply reasserted itself, the way habits do, and he’d been foolish to think one storm and shared oatcakes could undo sixty years of two families crossing the street to avoid each other?

            He didn’t know that it was his own voice, in his own kitchen, was the answer. He would have been horrified to know it.

***

On the fifth day, he stopped walking past and went in. Crumb & Co’s front door had a bell on it, bright and cheerful and entirely at odds with the way Freya’s face changed when she looked up from the counter and saw who’d caused it to ring.

            ‘We’re closing in ten minutes.’

            ‘I’m not here for bread.’ Nate stood just inside the doorway, suddenly unsure what to do with his hands. The way he always was around people he hadn’t fully worked out yet. Except this, he was beginning to understand, was worse because he had no idea what he’d done to be worked out against. ‘I just want to know what I did.’

            ‘You didn’t do anything.’ Flat. Final. The tone of someone who had decided a conversation isn’t going to happen and dared him to make her wrong.

            ‘Then why…’

            ‘Because I heard you.’ She said it fast, like pulling something out before she could stop herself, and then seemed almost surprised she’d said it at all. ‘Outside your shop. Your mum asked if there was something going on, and you said…’ She stopped. Started again, quieter. ‘You said it was one afternoon. That it didn’t mean anything.’

            The words landed exactly the way they must have landed the first time, in the lane. Nate felt something in him go very still and very cold, the specific stillness of hearing your own voice repeated back to you and recognising too late, every part of if you’d have changed if you’d known who was listening.

            ‘I didn’t mean it like that.’

            ‘You didn’t mean it at all, is what I heard.’ Freya’s arms were folded now, though it looked less like armour and more like something she was doing to stop her own hands from shaking. ‘I’m not asking you to fix your family, Nate. I know that’s not a five-minute job. I just… I needed you to know why. I wasn’t going to let you keep thinking it came from nowhere.’

            ‘It didn’t come from nowhere. I said something stupid to make my mother stop asking questions, and I didn’t think…’

            ‘No. You didn’t.’ Not cruel. Just true, and worse for it.

            He didn’t have an answer for that one. He stood in the doorway a moment longer, the bell above it still faintly swinging, and then did the only honest thing available to him.

            ‘I’m sorry. Properly. Not the kind of sorry that’s really about making myself feel better.’

            Something in her face shifted, very slightly. Not forgiveness, not yet, but the smallest possible acknowledgement that he’d said something true. ‘Okay,’ she said. Nothing more than that. It would have to be enough, for now.

            He left without buying any bread. He didn’t try to make her promise anything on his way out, which was, he suspected, the first genuinely un-stupid thing he’d managed in this whole business.

***

The marquee went up on the village green the way it always did. The same faded green-and-white stripes it had worn for as long as anyone could remember. Bunting looped between the trestle tables, sagging in places where it had been re-hung one too many autumns running. The whole of Dunmorrach turned out for it, as it always did, in the particular, determined way of a town that had decided, generations ago, that this was important, and never once revisited the decision.

            Nate arrived early, box balanced carefully against the wind. Margaret beside him in her good coat, already scanning the crowd for the Blooms with the focused vigilance of a woman checking enemy lines. He hadn’t spoken to Freya since the doorway of Crumb & Co, since okay, delivered flat and unpromising. The walk home afterward where he’d turned the whole conversation over and over and found no version of it that let him off easily.

            He knew, now, exactly, what he’d done and exactly who’d heard it. Knowing hadn’t made it any less humiliating. If anything, it had made the last few weeks worse. The particular, useless ache of having caused real harm to someone for the sake of a sentence that had cost him nothing to say and her rather a lot to hear.

            He’d caught sight of her twice across the green, already. Both times in deep conversation with people who weren’t him and both times he’d made himself look away before it became obvious he was looking at all. Though, this time, at least, he understood why she wasn’t looking back.

            The judging took the better part of an hour. Three judges in matching blazers, moving table to table with expressions of grave, faintly theatrical concentration, tasting, murmuring and occasionally exchanging a look Nate had spent years trying and failing to interpret. He barely tasted his own oatcakes when they were finally handed round for the crowd afterward. His stomach had been in something close to a knot since he’d caught sight of Freya’s tray three tables over. The cardamom bake, he was almost certain, thought refined now. Sharper, clearly the fifth or sixth attempt past the version she’d shown him in her kitchen.

Three tables over, Freya was doing considerably less well at looking composed than she’d have liked. She’d rebuilt the cardamom bake twice more since the storm. Chasing a version of the ratio that had nothing to do with proving anything to Nate Bannock, she told herself firmly, and everything to do with wanting it right before weeks of her mother’s phone calls came due. That was mostly due. It was not entirely true, and she knew it wasn’t, in the specific way you know a thing you’ve decided not to examine too closely.

            She hadn’t planned on being this aware of where he was standing. She hadn’t planned, either, on the small, stupid flicker of satisfaction she’d felt watching him try one of his own oatcakes and wince faintly at something. Nerves, probably, not the bake, because some old, petty part of her still wanted him to be nervous. The rest of her, considerably larger than she’d expected, mostly just wanted the whole thing over with so she could stop performing calm for a crowd that had never once let either of their families exist quietly.

            She hadn’t forgiven him. She’d told him as much, more or less, in her own kitchen three weeks ago, and she’d meant it. But she’d also spent the last few weeks since turning over the shape of his apology, not the kind that’s really about making myself feel better, more than she’d have liked to admit. She wasn’t entirely sure, standing here now with her tray in front of three judges with clipboards, what she actually wanted to happen next.

***

When the head judge finally stepped up to the small, slightly wobbling platform at the front of the marquee, the whole green went quiet in the way it only ever did once a year.

            ‘First place,’ she announced, in a tone that suggested she’d been waiting all afternoon for this exact sentence, ‘goes to Crumb & Co.’

            The applause was real, warm, and entirely genuine from most of the green. But not, Nate registered with a slow, sinking discomfort, from the small, tight knot of people standing directly around him.

            Freya heard her shop’s name land somewhere far away, the way big moments sometimes did, arriving a half-second behind the sound of them. Bridie, three feet away, made a noise somewhere between a sob and a cheer, grabbed her arm so hard it would leave a mark. It should have been, and mostly was, the best afternoon of Freya’s professional life. It was only once she’d taken the tray properly into her own hands, murmuring thanks she barely heard herself say, that she let herself glance toward the Bannock side of the green. Not out of triumph, though she suspected that was what it would look like to anyone watching. But because some old habit, three weeks old now, made her check where he was before she let herself feel anything all the way through. He wasn’t celebrating. He wasn’t even really looking at her. He was looking at his own family, with an expression she didn’t have a name for, and something about it made her hold her breath without entirely knowing why.

            ‘Well,’ Nate’s mother said, arms folded, voice pitched just low enough to seem private and just loud enough to carry. ‘There’s a surprise.’

            ‘Bound to happen eventually,’ someone from his aunt’s side of the family muttered, not quite under their breath. ‘Wonder whose recipe she used to manage that.’

            ‘Convenient timing, mind,’ said someone else. ‘Right after she’s had a good long look around somebody else’s kitchen.’

            It was said lightly enough that anyone overhearing might have called it teasing rather than accusation. That was exactly what made it land the way it did. Nate understood all at once and with a clarity that embarrassed him for not having felt it sooner, that this was simply how his family talked about the Blooms. Not viciously. Not even, most of the time, with any real venom behind it. Just automatically, the way you might complain about the weather. That was the shape the conversation had always taken, and nobody had ever seriously questioned whether it needed to.

            He thought about the kitchen. The careful, exact weighting of ingredients that looked chaotic and wasn’t. The four failed attempts at a ratio she’d talked him through without a trace of the smugness he’d have expected walking in that door a month ago. He thought about his own voice, saying it doesn’t mean anything, to a mother he loved. About the one afternoon that had meant, he now suspected, rather a great deal. He thought, too, of the crooked sign above his own shop, and the three years he and his mother had spent arguing about gold lettering instead of saying his father’s name out loud. All at once, he understood that he was tired of every part of his life being something people fought about instead of something anyone was honest about.

            ‘Why are we fighting again?’ he said, out loud, to nobody and everybody at once.

            His mother blinked. ‘Nathaniel…’

            ‘No, I mean it.’ He looked round at the small cluster of aunts and cousins and his own mother, all of them frozen mid-mutter. ‘Actually. Why. Because I’ve been doing this my whole life and I genuinely could not tell you. Can any of you?’

            Silence. A slightly uncomfortable shuffle of feet. Somewhere behind him, his aunt began, unconvincingly, ‘well, it’s tradition…’

            ‘That’s not a reason. That’s just what we call it, so we don’t have to have a reason.’

            Nobody had an answer. He hadn’t really expected one. He set his box down on the nearest table. Carefully, because old habits held even now, and walked away from his family before anyone could recover enough to stop him. Across the green, past the judge’s table, past a cluster of aunts on the Bloom side who went very still at his approach.

            Freya watched him come the whole way, tray still balanced in her hands and felt Bridie’s grip tighten again on her arm. A warning this time, not a celebration. She could have stepped back. She could have let her mother’s hand pull her half a step behind the safety of the crowd, the way thirty years of habit was quietly suggesting she do. She didn’t. Whatever this was going to be, she found she didn’t want to watch it happen from a safe distance, and that surprised her more than anything else that had happened all afternoon. She stayed exactly where she was and let him cross the whole green to reach her.

            She looked at him. He looked at her. The whole green, both of them were fairly sure, looked at both of them, in the specific, riveted way of a small village that had just realised it was about to witness something that will be discussed for the next decade.

            ‘Hi,’ he said.

            That was all. Just the one word, plain and slightly ridiculous given the size of the audience. Given sixty years and three generations and a book that had almost certainly never existed stood somewhere in the space between them. Freya’s mouth twitched. Not quite a smile yet. But close enough to one that Nate felt something in his chest loosen the exact same way it had in her kitchen, weeks ago, in the middle of a storm neither of them had asked for. She could have left him standing there with just the one word for his trouble. Instead, deliberately, in front of her mother and the whole of Dunmorrach, she took a half-step of her own, closing the last of the distance he’d left.

            ‘Hi,’ she said back.

Behind them, Dunmorrach, unable to help itself, began, quite audibly, to talk.

© 2026 CMG Writing. All rights reserved. This story is the original work of CMG Writing and may not be copied, reproduced, distributed, or republished in whole or in part without prior written permission from the author. Unauthorized sharing or reproduction of this content is prohibited.