Chances for Serendipity

by Natalie Chung

  Chapter 12

  “Mmmm, these things are delish. Like little pieces of heaven,” Ming said with exaggerated enthusiasm, licking a smear of chocolate off her lips. Poised in her hand was a half-eaten, strawberry-choc custard tart. It had all been her brilliant idea. After Max mentioned the one baking challenge he hadn’t minded losing against me, she’d insisted I make batches of them to sell this week . “Max has made these with me before, but yours are definitely better. The original!”

  “Hey, no eating on duty,” I said, but I chuckled at her contented smile.

  She proceeded to dust her hands over the bin and then covered the tray of tarts with a clear glass dome lid. “This will be a big hit with all our customers. You could open your own shop and only sell these tarts, and I’d come every day, your most loyal customer for life.” Her dimpled smile faltered. “Well, maybe not every day unless you make a sugar-free version. I don’t want to get high blood sugar.”

  My cheeks warmed at the praise, and I quickly ducked my head to hide my smile while I wiped the rest of the tart crumbs off the counter and into the bin.

  My first week off work was flying by so quickly. It was already Thursday. Since Mum left a few days ago, I relied on Ming to help me. We woke up extra early in the morning so we could get most of the baking done before the bakery opened for the day. Thank goodness for the existence of coffee or I didn’t know how I’d manage.

  How had Mum done it for the past seven years without Dad? She was Wonder Woman reincarnated or something. Sure Ming helped now, and my cousin Lee worked a few days a week. But most of it was on Mum, and I was beginning to see just how much of her personal life she’d sacrificed to keep the bakery alive without Dad. We should’ve been giving her breaks more often. If anyone deserved it, Mum did.

  Still, I didn’t hate all the hard work. Maybe because everyone was so nice. Some of Mum’s friends practically squealed at seeing me again. As embarrassing as it was to hear them say Mum talked a lot about me, I was happy to be back, even if only temporarily.

  Too bad it wouldn’t last. But I would enjoy it while I could.

  The bell jingled on the front door as it opened, and Ming and I looked up from our tasks. A tall lady walked in, and her gaze landed on me. Or it looked that way. It was hard to tell with the sunglasses hiding her eyes.

  “Am I seeing a ghost?” she said, gasping. Before I could respond, she marched up to us in three long strides and swept me up in an embrace.

  “Hi, Mrs Miller,” I said into her shoulder and breathed in the strong scent of her lavender perfume.

  “Still calling me that? I see some things haven’t changed.” She squeezed my waist as if to make sure I really wasn’t a ghost, then let go of me and took a step back. “For the thousandth time, dear—call me Rose.” Her head tilted to the side, and I caught a glimpse of my face mirrored in her sunglasses. “Unless you want me to start calling you Serendipity?”

  Nope, not in a million years. “Rose,” I conceded. “Long time no see.”

  Funny how some things worked out. After she’d paid me back for buying her sister’s baby formula all those years ago, she kept returning to our bakery. “Isaac is a picky eater, but he loves your buns,” she had told me, much to my delight. From then on, she’d been a loyal weekly customer. But with the stress of finishing uni this year and starting part-time work, I hadn’t seen her in ages.

  Rose removed her sunglasses and tucked them in over her buttoned blouse. “Well, I’m glad to finally see your face again.” One side of her mouth curved upward in a smirk, her eyes twinkling with mirth. “Your mum kept giving me excuses for you every time I asked when you’d be around.” Then in an eerily accurate impression of Mum, she said, “‘My daughter is a busy girl, on her way to becoming a lawyer. She’s a hard worker.’ I thought they must have locked you inside your work office and thrown away the key.”

  As Rose prattled on, I took a moment to observe her. Brown curls tumbled down to her shoulders, and an ever-present smile was upon her lips. She always had this motherly feel about her; the way she spoke so amicably without reserve and took a personal interest in everyone. It seemed her friendly chit-chat nature hadn’t changed a bit.

  “Oh, by the way,” Rose said, turning to Ming, “look what I finally got!” She withdrew a magazine from her handbag and handed it to her. “It should be on page thirty-something.”

  Ming thanked her and flipped through the magazine.

  I stared at the two women. “What are you two talking about?” I asked Ming, but she was too busy looking at whatever it was in the magazine to reply.

  “Don’t you know?” Rose asked.

  “Nope.”

  “I’m surprised your mum didn’t tell you. I’m helping a friend with the local food magazine this month, and she wanted my take on the best food places in the area. So I asked your mum if we could put Tsang’s Bakery in it, and she said it’s all fine. She gave me some nice photos of your bakery.”

  “That’s amazing.” This could potentially attract more customers, giving us more business.

  “Ooh, look at you. You look good in this photo, Sere.” Ming flashed a dimpled grin at me.

  Blood rushed to my head all at once. My legs were already moving to stand beside her before I could think.

  Tsang’s Bakery, for all your sweet and savoury cravings, it said on the top of the double-page spread. I skimmed over the text underneath—family business… Caters to events… An absolute delight—to where a collage of photos and a few discount coupons cluttered the remainder of the space. Most of them were close-ups of our baked goods like pineapple buns, egg tarts, paper sponge cakes, and barbecue pork buns. That wasn’t what caught my eye though.

  Oh, no, no, no.

  In the middle of those beautiful shots of delectable bakery goods was my face. Granted, it wasn’t the worst photo ever of me. I smiled at something off-camera, holding up a pair of tongs in one hand and a tray of egg tarts in another. You could even see the sleek shine on my black hair and the flakiness of the egg tart crusts.

  These must’ve been the photos Lee had taken of our bakery for practice with his expensive camera. That was supposed to have been family photos and shots of the food. Or so I had thought.

  I moaned, grabbed a hold of Ming’s shoulder, and shook her. “Is it too late to remove me from this thing?”

  “I’m sorry. It’s already been printed, and they’re sending it out today as we speak,” Rose answered for her. The sheepish smile on her face didn’t look apologetic in the slightest. Sorry not sorry, it seemed to say.

  Oh well. Hopefully this would help us attract potential customers. We could really use some more.

  But why hadn’t Mum told me about this free promotion? She usually loved sharing news about free things. “Cafe near the train station is giving away free ice cream,” she’d gushed to me a few weeks ago. Yet she hadn’t had the time to inform me about this?

  An irritating squeak emanated from the floor as Rose moved around to collect buns, disrupting me from my spiralling thoughts. Note to self—tell Max we definitely need to renovate the floorboards.

  I smiled when Rose grabbed a couple of cocktail buns to put onto her tray. Looked like Isaac’s favourite hadn’t changed.

  After several minutes, she placed down an entire tray filled to the max. I punched in the prices and quantity into our cash register, and Ming helped me bag each item by type into plastic bags.

  “How’s Isaac doing these days? Still playing tennis?” I hadn’t seen him for more than a year now. Back in my uni days, when I’d worked in the bakery more often, he’d drop by here for snacks on his way back from school and talk to me all about the latest tennis news. I missed the little guy.

  “Good, good. Of course he’s still playing tennis. Do you really need to ask?”

  No, I should’ve known that boy would never stop loving tennis.

  “But he’s still keeping up with his studies…” Her eyes widened. “Oh, that’s right! You just rem
inded me. I wanted to ask for your help.”

  “My help?”

  “Yeah. My not-so-little boy turns eleven next week. Do you remember those tennis-ball lollipop things you make?”

  My mind conjured up the image of a tennis ball on a lollipop stick. “Oh, you mean the cake pops?” Every year in December for the week Dad’s birthday was on, I would make little round cakes layered in chocolate and skewered them on lollipop sticks. Then I decorated them to look like tennis balls. Max had given me the idea to sell them after an experiment with leftover cake mix. Not to sell for a profit, but to donate to a charity that had helped us during Dad’s time in the hospital.

  He’d said, “If we can help others in need, it’ll be worth it.” So it had become a sort of tradition, one that I’d carried on for all these years.

  “Yes, yes! Cake pops.” Rose clapped her hands. “I was wondering if you could make some for Isaac’s party.”

  Hmm, they were pretty easy to bake, and I would be baking them next week anyway. “Sure.”

  At my confirmation, Rose paid for the food and departed with a kiss on my cheek and a promised invitation to Isaac’s birthday party next Sunday.

  By the next week, I’d gotten used to the morning wake up and workload, and we were—surprise, surprise—getting more customers in than usual. That magazine was serving us well. But on Wednesday morning, things took a turn for the worse.

  “Can you believe Ming is sick? She’s never sick,” I whined to Max, spreading egg wash across the tops of pineapple buns with a brush. They went straight in the oven after I was done. Hurry, hurry, my mind screamed at me as I set the timer.

  Max stooped over the sink, munching down on his meagre breakfast of jam toast while I stressed about how impossible it would be to run the bakery without Ming. “We won’t be able to sell any red bean buns today. Or cocktail buns.” She’d managed to bake everything else this morning, but I wouldn’t be able to bake what was missing and manage the shop once it opened. “How can she be sick?”

  “You forget she’s human too. Not your ‘secret guardian angel,’” Max said after his mouth was no longer full of toast.

  Oh man, I regretted telling him how I called her that in my head. “You’re a bum,” I said. “You know I’m worried about her. You should check up on her later. Make her some congee.”

  A joke. Making congee wasn’t in his knowledge as far as I knew. We’d been taught all the bakery’s recipes by our parents from a young age, but besides that, he could barely cook an egg.

  “Hah, funny.” He pulled his infamous why-are-you-my-sister-again face at me, but it was soon replaced with a thoughtful look. “Don’t worry. She might be able to sleep it off while I’m at work.” He picked up his work bag, and I followed him to the storefront.

  “Too bad my boss won’t let me take time off on short notice. You should ring up Lee. Ask him if he wants to take Ming’s shift today,” he suggested. Our cousin had taken the next few weeks off to commit to his freelance photography. Who knew if he was even available now.

  “Yeah, maybe.” But I had no intention of bothering Lee. I could handle this on my own. “See you,” I said, watching Max leave.

  I locked the door and returned to the kitchen, noting down the number of buns we’d baked so far for the day. Without Ming, we wouldn’t be able to replenish the stock throughout the day. Ming really did pull everything together. I was useless without her.

  I trawled my aching feet back to the storefront and deposited a tray of freshly cooked egg tarts into their glass cabinet.

  I would not give in to despair. I could do this. No biggie. Even if Ming couldn’t come in tomorrow either, if I woke up earlier, I could maybe get most of the usual quantity baked in time.

  The cuckoo clock on the shop wall chirped out a long tune, alerting me to the time—9:00 a.m. Oh crap. Time to open up shop.

  A frantic urgency swept over me, plunging me into a dazed frenzy. I unlocked the front door and flipped the sign to “Now Open,” then rushed back and forth between the kitchen and storefront, setting everything up.

  Just as I placed the paper sponge cakes into their respective glass cabinet, the bell on the door jangled. A warm breeze drifted inside, pulling me out of my daze.

  “Good morning,” I greeted, my voice filled with false cheer. I moved the sponge cakes around with a pair of tongs until they looked more presentable, then turned around, prepared to explain the situation to a regular customer. It was usually the same few who came in before their work hours started. Sorry, we don’t have all the buns out today. One of our workers is sick, so we’re a little short-staffed. But those words never left my lips.

  Instead, my entire body jerked to a stop, and I gaped at the familiar face standing in the doorway. My mind took a moment to process what my eyes were seeing.

  But it couldn’t be true.

  It was Aiden Andale.

  Chapter 13

  “Morning,” Aiden said, as if it was the most normal thing for him to be here.

  I’m dreaming. I must be freaking dreaming, I thought, my eyes tracing over his features. His face—it was the same face I’d seen countless times playing in tennis tournaments, down to the small mole slightly obscured by his perfectly pointed nose.

  I only realised I was gawking when his gaze landed on me. Look away, Sere. But it was like I’d turned into a statue. Every one of my limbs locked into place, refusing to budge. As though one wrong movement would prove that what I was seeing right now wasn’t real.

  Seconds or minutes passed. I wouldn’t have known which. It was like time had stopped inside the bakery. Then a faint clatter shattered our silent staring contest, bringing me back into motion.

  I looked down. The tongs I’d been holding had dropped out of my hands and onto the floor. Oops.

  “Let me get that,” Aiden said at the same time I stooped to retrieve it.

  Before I could react, we collided. A jarring pain shot through the top of my head, and I bit back my cry.

  “Oww.” Aiden splayed a hand on the floor to steady himself, his other clutching his head.

  “Sorry,” I whimpered, nursing my own throbbing lump that would inevitably form a bruise. I mentally prepared myself for a shocked answer of indignation or an unpleasant retort. Something an entitled celebrity would say. Watch it or I’ll sue you.

  He said neither. A soft breath of laughter escaped his lips instead, startling me into looking up. His hazel eyes crinkled in amusement, flecks of green shining. “Why does this remind me of the first time we met?”

  My stomach swooped low at the deep tone of his husky voice. He remembered me? Had he come looking for me? Haha, as if. No way. Scratch that. What in the world was he doing here then? In my bakery? It must’ve been a coincidence. Something easily explainable. But what?

  If I confided in seventeen-year-old me right now, she would’ve been squealing non-stop. Teenage-me had dreamt of this very moment. Meeting him again. Except it had gone a little differently in my younger, naive head—him popping into the sports centre again. Or bumping into him at the Australian Open. Not right here, in the safe haven of my family’s bakery.

  Distracted by my runaway thoughts, I could only gawk at him as he blinked at me with a disarming smile on his face. In one fluid motion, he picked up the tongs from off the floor and lifted himself up.

  “We finally meet again, eh?” he said, extending a hand out in the space between us.

  I stared blankly at him until the ache in my feet reminded me I was still crouched on the floor. Unable to withstand the uncomfortable position any longer, I gave in, placing my hand in his. A radiating heat consumed me at the contact, like I was sticking my hand in front of an open oven. I tried to ignore it, pushing off the floor at the same time he pulled me up.

  Now this was where things went oh-so wrong. Rather than my legs straightening out and finding balance like a normal person, I stumbled forward—and slammed straight into Aiden’s chest.

  I gasped, the strong
earthy scent of his cologne filling my nostrils. My lips parted, preparing to apologise, but my tongue remained glued to the roof of my mouth.

  It was all his body’s fault. If touching his hand alone felt like being in front of an open oven, being pressed flush against him was one step further. It felt like being shoved right inside of that oven. Way too hot and dangerous. I was going to burn myself. Sweat had already begun to dampen my skin, despite turning the aircon on an hour ago in anticipation of the thirty-five degree Celsius weather forecast. I should’ve been cold, not hot. What was wrong with me?

  Sudden pressure on my shoulder pulled me out of my stupor—Aiden’s hand was pushing me back. My skin grew even hotter. Oh my gosh, he probably thought I was acting like a silly fangirl, oblivious to personal space.

  Using the momentum of his push, I quickly took a huge step away from him. A fraction of the fiery heat dissipated, leaving me blinking down at the worn floorboards. “S-sorry!” I stuttered, slowly lifting my gaze upward.

  Big mistake. No, correction—huge mistake. The instant my eyes met his, I was caught in the grip of the mesmerising hazel colour of them all over again. Honestly, they effectively short-circuited my ability to form sentences. “Um...”

  “Here.” He held out the tongs.

  “Thanks,” I muttered, grabbing them. I studied his face, but his expression was indiscernible. He could’ve been totally getting the wrong idea about my weird stumble, for all I knew. But oh gosh, I hoped he wasn’t. I wracked my mushy brain for something else I could say, but his attention had already drifted elsewhere.

  “Woah! Did you make these?” He closed in on the front counter and pointed to the tennis ball cake pops. “They look like the real thing.”

  I nodded, cheeks flaming at his praise.

  “What’s the green stuff?”

  “Sanding sugar,” I said. The question spurred me to life, and although he didn’t ask, I added, “The inside is made of crumbled cake mixed with buttercream and then dipped in melted chocolate. It’s an easy recipe.”