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I pulled the first dozen files and moved back to the attic steps, where the light was better and the air a touch cooler.

Smoothing my hand over the first file, I opened it.

I was expecting to see the files and forms my dad used.

W-2s, business license. But the first page contained a bill of sale for flour: forty pounds at twenty-five cents per five-pound bag.

There were more receipts, and I marveled at the cost of butter, eggs, and sugar.

There were ration books that my grandmother, like the wartime women, used to buy precious items such as sugar and butter.

As a baker’s wife, she’d have enjoyed extra rations through the business.

By the end of file one, all I’d gained was a lesson in inflation.

Digging through the next three or four files, I found letters from my grandfather, a bank loan agreement to pay for the oven we used today, and information about local shopkeepers and merchants. But there was no mention of employees.

I neatly stacked and returned the files to the cabinet before grabbing more files to be searched page by page.

As I went through, I imagined the grandfather I never knew.

The bread, his customers, and the seasons ruled his life as they now directed mine.

My father said his father had had a beautiful singing voice, and customers marveled at his talent.

Grandfather McCrae had dreamed of singing in New York on a grand stage.

My father had a tin ear, and his dreams were of joining the army and flying planes.

Both had surrendered dreams for the bakery.

My dreams had changed over the years. First it had been college and then a master’s. Then a top job. Then to make big bucks. And then, well ... since my return to Alexandria, my dreams had ceased to matter. Maybe one day I’d make new ones.

Maybe.

Or was I going to be like my father and sacrifice the rest of my life for the bakery?

And what about the kid? Was he going to grow up here with a mom frazzled by lack of sleep, shaky finances, and long hours behind the retail counter?

I didn’t exactly yearn for a return to finance.

The money was good, but lately the idea of getting on a plane in a suit didn’t thrill me so much. But the bakery wasn’t enough.

“Damn.”

I opened the last set of files dated 1943 and discovered the first set of employee files. My grandfather noted he was advertising for new employees, including a clerk to run the front counter: Clean, reliable, good with people.

There were no applications, only names with notes on a blank page. Christopher is too brash. Rosa is too short. Willa—my wife doesn’t like her. And finally, Jenna. A pleasant girl, nice smile, can bake. There’s a check beside her name. This was my first bit of information on Jenna.

Pleasant, nice smile, and can bake.

I kept digging through the papers and found, filed under 1944, a black-and-white picture of six women and my grandfather.

My grandfather’s hair was dark, and his body lean and fit.

He was holding a plate of cookies and grinning at the camera.

All smiling, young and slim, each girl wears a skirt dipping below the knees, a sweater, socks, and dark shoes.

The girls had their arms linked together.

A USO banner hung in the Union Street Bakery window, and snow on the ground suggested it was winter.

I leaned in and studied the smiling faces.

It wasn’t hard to spot Jenna. She was the third from the left.

In this image her uniform hugged a narrow waist. Her face was slimmer than I remembered, so I pulled the other picture of Jenna from my pocket.

The first image, from the recipe box, appeared to have been taken after this newly discovered image.

The group photo of the girls taken in winter, and the picture of Jenna and the soldier snapped later, in spring.

In the spring photo, Jenna’s face had filled out.

“Working in a bakery is hard on your waistline.”

For the first time I moved my hand to my belly, which now strained the snaps of my pants.

Weeks of telling myself I’d put on weight because of the bakery seemed absurd.

For a moment I kept my hand there, still wondering if I’d feel a flutter or a kick.

But the kid was still. Not going to move until he was good and ready.

Stubborn. A chip off the old block, I thought with a bit of pride. Gordon had admired my stubborn streak.

Pushing aside a jolt of sadness, I focused on the photo’s discovery. I returned to the cabinet, hoping to find some other scrap of the woman who’d hidden her recipes in the wall.

But a search of the entire decade revealed no more details. Jenna appeared twice. Once in the form of a scrawled note: A pleasant girl, nice smile, can bake. And in the photograph. Then she vanished as if she’d never been at the bakery.

I fixated on the changes in her body from winter to spring.

I didn’t have hard and fast dates, but I was guessing they were taken about four months apart.

Four months. In my case a time of great, great change.

For reasons I cannot explain, as I looked at the spring image, I got the whisper of an idea.

At first, I brushed it away as nonsensical.

But the more I stared, the deeper its roots grew. Jenna was pregnant.

Or was she? Or was I looking for a kindred spirit?

The assumption of her pregnancy opened a host of questions for me. Was she married? Who was the baby’s father? Was he one of the soldiers in the spring picture? What became of Jenna and the baby? The baby would be close to seventy now.

I wished Margaret were in town to do her historical-digging magic. She’d take a name and a photo and, if given a couple of days, would unearth all that had been written about the person.

What would Margaret do? WWMD? Assuming Jenna was pregnant and the baby was born at the end of 1944 and was baptized, I could check the newspaper. Birth records. Church records. The 1950 census records.

“All right, Jenna, let me see what I can find out about you.”

“What do you mean there’s a problem?” Five minutes back at the bakery, and I had trouble.

Jean Paul pulled a cigarette packet from his breast pocket, caught my irritated glare, and tucked it back in. “The wiring in this place is ancient. I’ll need to do more to bring it up to standards. And I’m worried about the floorboards and whether they can support the freezer.”

Dollar signs danced in my head. After leaving Mom and Dad’s, I’d driven to IKEA and purchased shelves for the basement winery.

The more I thought about the addition of wine and cheeses, the more I liked it.

The profit margin on Gus’s wine, if I could survive the cash outlay, would be tremendous and might enable us to come out of this renovation a bit ahead of the game. “How much and how long?”

He shrugged. “A thousand for the wiring and the floor.”

“Can you be very specific? I’m counting pennies here.”

He sniffed. Shrugged. “It’s hard to tell now.”

“Why? You said you’ve done this before.”

“It’s an old building. There are always surprises.”

Dad had always said when you opened an old building, you never knew what you were going to find.

I’d been hoping we’d catch a break. “I need this bakery open and running in eleven days. If I’m closed longer, I’ll lose money I do not have.

And I got a call from your pal Gus. He’s headed this way with a thousand bottles of wine in three days. ”

Jean Paul ran the unlit cigarette under his nose, inhaling the tobacco. “It’ll all come together. Do not worry.”

Easier said than done. This bakery supported Rachel and her girls, but it had to feed the kid now. It had to make it.

“Jean Paul, you’re going to get this job done. On time. And on budget. Figure out what must be cut from the budget to make this work.”

“Of course.”

“That’s all you have to say?”

He rolled the unlit cigarette between his fingers. “What more is there?”

Clenching and unclenching my teeth, I held on to my temper as it struggled to break free.

“Your answers are too quick and easy for me. I want more thought, more anguish.”

He arched a brow. “Americans love their drama.”

“The French have had their share.”

He shrugged. “I do not have time for this. I have work.”

“Right.”

Jean Paul was a mystery to me. Not much riled him. He was even philosophical about my smoking ban if he could retreat to the alley for his smoke.

Jean Paul turned back to his wires threaded through the exposed studs. “Leave.”

My skin bristled. “What?”

“There’s no work for you here now, and the stress is not good for you or the baby.”

My heart pounded in my ears. “What?”

He looked back at me, an eyebrow cocked. “Please.”

A trio of arguments elbowed their way to the front of my brain, but logic quickly cast them aside. What was I going to say? “Is it that obvious?”

“To me, yes.”

“Am I getting fat?”

He hesitated as if sensing he’d entered a minefield of fat questions. “There is a glow.”

“A glow?” Artful dodge. “Of course.”

I’d never thought I’d had any kind of glow. Jaundiced or green around the gills, yes. It was nice to think I was glowing around someone. “Yeah, well, don’t tell anyone. At least for now.”

“Don’t tell me. Tell your belly.”

“I’m getting fat?”

Again, he wove out of the loaded question’s path. “No. Now leave.” He mumbled in French and waved me away.

“Fine.”

Outside the bakery the warm afternoon air greeted me with a soft breeze. With a queasy stomach refusing to let me paint or assemble shelves, I cut across Union Street toward the meandering waters of the Potomac River. The waters were offset by the clear blue sky, stippled with clouds.