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But her sudden arrival into my life had left me stunned and had silenced the millions of questions I’d had as a kid.

Now as I stared at the light-but-not-dark-pink stick, the questions flickered to life.

What was it like when she was pregnant with my two half brothers and me?

Did she have morning sickness? Did her feet swell?

How much weight did she gain? How was the delivery?

Genetic time bombs in the family tree, maybe? Damn.

Stupid stick. It had stirred up more questions for my birth mother, Terry, and more of my own unresolved emotions.

Even if the stick stayed a light, light pink, today’s stirring had disturbed the cauldron.

So why exactly did she leave me? I’d never really gotten the question answered, other than she’d been young and troubled.

Why do you love your sons but don’t want to see me again?

I imagined them to be special young boys who gave her no trouble at all.

I shook the stick, held it upside down, and then studied it again.

No change.

Me. Daisy Sheila McCrae. With a kid.

The image simply didn’t compute. I’d never pictured myself with children.

My sister Rachel had two of the cutest girls in the world, and I’d give my life for them.

My older sister, Margaret, always talked about marriage and having a family one day, and I could picture her sitting cross-legged on the floor, finger-painting with a half-dozen blond children.

Both my sisters grew up assuming motherhood would be a part of their lives.

But for me babies hadn’t been in the master plan.

Logically, I understood my abandonment was a big part of the no-kid policy. What if I made a baby and couldn’t raise it? My mom always assured me I’d be a great parent, but the fear I’d hurt my child never left.

Some people say young children forget trauma, but they’re wrong. We might not have words or vivid minute-by-minute memories, but we remember on a cellular level.

And with no genetic background to review, making a baby was akin to Russian roulette. I know, I know, we all play a form of the game when making a baby, but my genetics had been such an unknown for so long, a baby hadn’t made sense.

Since my reunion with Terry, I’d gained a good bit of medical history and could trace back her family—my family—for several generations. I had more answers now than I ever did. But the extra knowledge wasn’t enough to prepare me for motherhood.

I glared at the stick. Was it a little pinker? Was it pink enough? “One simple direct answer is all I want. Yes, or no?”

Footsteps sounded on the stairs leading to my room, and I glanced at the stick as if I feared it would somehow shout Daisy might be pregnant!

I hustled into the bathroom, took one last look at the sort-of-pinkish center, and tossed it into the trash. Smoothing hands through my hair, I glanced at myself in the mirror and smiled.

“If you were pregnant,” I whispered, “then it would be bright pink. The box promised it would be pink within a minute, and it’s been five minutes. Don’t borrow trouble. There’s no baby, and Gordon and I’ll be fine.”

“Daisy?” My sister Rachel’s voice echoed from outside my door.

“Be right there, Rachel.” I combed fingers through my hair, pulled the rubber band from my wrist, and twisted and secured my hair in a topknot.

A strained smile was plastered on my face as I opened the door.

Rachel was eight inches shorter than me and had strawberry blond hair, and her skin was five shades lighter than mine. Hers was a peaches and cream complexion that easily burned in the sun, whereas my olive complexion soaked up the rays.

She was our bakery’s pastry chef and was considered a talent in the restaurant circles, though she’d never been formally trained.

She’d wanted to attend an upscale cooking academy in Maryland, but financially my parents couldn’t swing it.

What she didn’t learn from our father she’d taught herself with books and videos.

Beyond her baking skills, Rachel also had an annoying knack of reading me like one of her recipes. Her smile faded. “What’s wrong?”

I cleared my throat and shrugged my shoulders. “Nothing’s wrong, other than it is four o’clock in the morning.”

Blue eyes narrowed. “You’re used to the hours.”

“I don’t complain like I did in the beginning, but I refuse to become accustomed to a baker’s life. Every sane person in this city is asleep now.”

She shoved out a relieved breath. “Irritated. A little bitchy. My Daisy. The smile was unexpected, and it scared me.”

As I stepped into the hallway, I pulled my apartment door closed. “I’ll try to remember smiling is bad.”

“Not bad, but out of character for you.”

“Duly noted.” We descended the narrow staircase.

The Union Street Bakery had been in business for over one hundred and fifty years.

The original building had been located on Alexandria’s shoreline along the large wharfs but had burned in a fire in the 1880s.

Our great-great-grandfather, Shaun McCrae, and his wife, Sally, had rebuilt the business and moved it to the current location on Union Street.

They raised four children here, and there’d been a McCrae in this locale ever since.

While fifty years ago a bakery had been a daily stop for most, that wasn’t the case anymore.

Most folks these days did their shopping at grocery stores and rarely made a side trip to a mom-and-pop operation like the Union Street Bakery.

We had our steady customers and in the last couple of months had supplemented our income with several catering jobs.

But the retail business had not really grown.

People loved us, but they just didn’t want to go out of their way for us.

I’d come to realize that if we were going to survive, we had to reach out to some of the smaller grocery stores and get them to carry our goods.

But to accomplish this, we had to correct logistic problems at the bakery first. The kitchen was in the basement.

A manageable obstacle if you had a strong guy like my late brother-in-law or my dad in his prime to carry the hundred-pound sacks up and down the stairs.

When Rachel had run the place alone, she’d gotten around the heavy-lifting problem by ordering small bags of flour and sugar, but small translated into expensive .

If we were going to show a higher profit, we needed to move the kitchen to the main level. We also needed a freezer.

Until now we made all our dough the day of or the night before. Fine for daily customers, but if we planned to expand, we needed a freezer to stockpile dough and cake.

All this meant we needed a serious renovation, requiring that we close the shop for two weeks. It was a painful financial proposition, but necessary if we wanted to take the business to the next step.

“You’re looking a little rough this morning,” Rachel said.

“How do you look remotely human this time of day?” And she did. Rachel had a way of practically springing out of bed looking, well, perfect. “You make the rest of us look bad.”

She grinned. “I’ve made coffee.”

“Great.” The idea of my favorite brew had my stomach flip-flopping as I moistened dry lips.

What I really craved was one of the ginger ales I’d hidden in the refrigerator downstairs. If I was lucky, I’d be able to stomach the ginger ale and a handful of saltines.

I’d not been sick until just a couple of weeks ago.

And the more I thought about my upset stomach, the more convinced I became it wasn’t morning sickness but the flu.

The good thing about my sickness was that it lasted all day, and I was certain nausea associated with pregnancy was restricted to not only the mornings but also the first-trimester mornings.

“Demo starts today,” I said.

Rachel somehow summoned a smile. “I bet it goes real smoothly.”

I held my index finger to my lips. “Shh. Don’t speak so positively. You’ll jinx us.”

She gently elbowed me. “You’ve got to learn to think positively.”

“Right.”

I shoved out a breath, already dreading the construction. To make room for the kitchen equipment in the basement, we needed to knock out my office wall. My office would move to my apartment, and the reclaimed square footage would hold the freezer and the basement ovens.

One of the selling points of the Union Street Bakery was our brick oven.

Located in the basement, it gave our breads a fine crust a conventional oven couldn’t duplicate.

This old oven would remain in the basement, because as much as I wanted to move it up to the main floor, the oven was grandfathered in by the city, and if we moved one brick, we’d have to demo it totally.

And instead of building a new oven, we would patch the cracks in the side and hope it lasted a few more years.

Our new head baker, Jean Paul Martin, had arrived on our doorstep five weeks ago.

He had proved himself to be a talented baker, but when he’d assured us he could tackle the renovation, I’d been skeptical.

He’d fixed and built several brick ovens in his native France.

He’d also framed several kitchens. Our project should take ten to fourteen days, he had promised.

We’d lose one selling Saturday and would be back in operation by the second Saturday.

“ Ne t’inquiète pas. Tout est en ordre . ” Don’t worry. Everything is under control.

I remained skeptical when he told me his fees, which were dirt cheap. He’d barely make a dime off the job. But a dime was all I had to spare. So I’d agreed.

The bakery’s accounts had tipped barely into the black, and this downtime would land us back in the red. But ten to fourteen days was a survivable delay. We could do two weeks. But not a day more.