They come up to the roof because the ovens are cold for the first time in six years, and neither of them knows how to be in a building that isn't warm underneath.
The vent still holds heat. Rachel puts her palm flat on it the way you'd touch a horse, and Tom drops into the lawn chair that has always been his, the one with the split webbing. Between them, on the concrete, sits the last tray. One boule, blistered dark, the crumb they'll never argue over again after tonight.
"You proofed it long," she says. She doesn't look at him. She looks at the city, twelve floors of it, thin and far.
"I proofed it right."
"You proofed it scared. Look at that spring. That's a loaf that didn't trust itself."
This is the ritual. Six years of last trays and she has never once let one go by without telling him what he did wrong, and he has never once agreed, and neither of them has ever meant a single word of it as bread. He knows that now. He's known it a while and pretended the knowing was something else.
"Your lamination's separating," he says, because it's his line, because the fight has a shape and the shape is the only thing they've got left. "Third batch running. You rushed the butter."
"I did not rush the butter."
"You always rush the butter. You'd rush a sunset."
She almost smiles. He watches it not happen. The grey at her temples catches the light off the far towers, and the young face she wears fights the grey, and tonight the fight is close, tonight the young face is losing, and he wants — this is what the closing of the building has cracked open in him — he wants to see her lose it. He wants to see the forty-four sitting under the thirty-one she carries around like a knife.
Somewhere below them a window bangs open, a kid shouts something in Spanish, and the city answers with a horn and then goes back to its own business. Indifferent as a starter culture. Alive and not caring.
She reaches down. Picks up the starter jar. Holds it out to him across the space between the chairs the way she has a thousand times, wrist turned, the proofing-rack scar white on her thumb.
"Do the thing," she says. "My wrist."
He takes it. He always takes it. He fits the jar into his palm, sets his grip, and it's nothing, the lid gives at the first turn like it always does, and he hands it back, and that is the ritual too, the smallest one, the one under the argument.
"It was never my wrist," she says.
His hand stops.
"I could always open it." She's looking at him now. All of her, both numbers, the lie shimmering and then just leaving, sliding up off her face like heat off the vent. "I just liked watching you do the one thing I asked you for."
Six years. Six years he felt useful for exactly one thing and it was a jar she could have opened herself every single time. He doesn't know whether to laugh or put his head through the vent.
The city goes on being loud, far down. Up here there's only the coconut of her shampoo in the apron she lent him, green under it, and the warm concrete breathing through his soles, and the honest number arriving in her eyes and staying.
"Rachel."
"Don't." She sets the jar down. "Six years I've been telling you your crumb was scared. It wasn't your crumb." She stands, comes the two steps, and he stands too because his body decides before he does. They have stood shoulder to shoulder at a bench for six years and never once turned. He turns. She's smaller face to face than she is beside him. He'd forgotten.
He lets his own lie go. Lets the forty-something he performs at the counter slide up to the forty-seven that sits behind his eyes, the tired true one, and watches her watch it land. She doesn't flinch. She leans into it, her forehead coming down against his so their breath makes one warm pocket in the cold.
"There you are," she says. "God. There you actually are."
Her thumb finds his knuckle, the flour still in the crease, and drags across it slow, the scar catching his skin. He closes the last inch. Her mouth is warm and tastes of nothing but her, and she makes a small sound into it that is not an argument, and he holds it, holds it, because tomorrow at noon the warmth goes out from under them for good and this is the only heat left in the building and he is not going to be the one to end it first.
He isn't. She isn't either.
The jar sits open on the concrete, catching the towers' light, the lid beside it where no one set it down carefully.
