Tonight, your child is
the hero of the story.

Chapter 1: The Bakery That Shouldn't Have Lights On

Everyone in the neighborhood agreed on two things about the old bakery on Juniper Street: it had been empty since before anyone's grandmother could remember, and its front window still smelled, impossibly, of vanilla on warm evenings.

Nora Blackwood knew the smell better than anyone, because she stopped at that window every single day on her walk home, pressing her nose to the dusty glass. The painted sign had faded to a whisper: PLUME'S FINE CAKES. Inside, shrouded shapes of counters and cold ovens slept under eighty years of dust. As a baker herself, a serious one with a notebook, Nora considered the whole situation a tragedy.

Then came the night of the thunderstorm, when the power went out and Marzipan the cat refused to come in, yowling on the porch with her fur full of static electricity. Nora went out with a towel to fetch her, and stopped dead on the top step.

Down the block, through the rain, the dead bakery was glowing. Warm gold light spilled from its window onto the wet street. And its chimney! Its chimney was curling a ribbon of smoke up into the storm.

Nora was down the steps before she'd decided anything, Marzipan trotting beside her like this had been the plan all along. At the window, she cupped her hands against the glass, which was suddenly clean and polished and gleaming, and looked into a bakery in full midnight bloom. Copper pans blazed on their hooks. The ovens roared amber. Flour hung in the air like indoor snow.

And at the marble counter stood a woman who seemed made of flour, or moonlight, or both. She was tall and elegant and slightly transparent, her apron immaculate, her silver hair pinned in a bun you could set a clock by. She was icing an enormous, magnificent cake, her spatula moving with the precision of a surgeon, and she was speaking to it through her teeth.

"This time," the ghost said. "This time you will be perfect."

She smoothed the final stroke of icing. She stepped back. For one shining second the cake stood complete: six tiers, white as a wedding, utterly flawless.

Then a crack whispered down its side, quiet as a secret. The ghost's shoulders sagged in a way Nora recognized from her own kitchen mirror. And the whole magnificent thing sighed, buckled, and collapsed into a heap of glittering dust. The dust rose, swirled, and settled back into waiting ingredients on the marble, ready to begin again.

The ghost pressed her floury hands to her face. Marzipan, with the excellent timing of cats, chose that exact moment to knock over a milk bottle on the doorstep.

The ghost's head snapped up. Her eyes, pale as powdered sugar, found Nora's through the glass. And the bakery door swung slowly, invitingly, open.

From inside came a voice like sugar poured over ice. "Eighty years," it said. "Eighty years, and at last a baker stops to watch. Come in, little one. The bakery has been expecting you."