Chapter 1: Yeast
The bakery has four walls before it has a roof, and Peeta says that's the right order, though I've never seen anyone build a bakery and I'm fairly sure he hasn't either.
I come down out of the woods in the late afternoon with two rabbits and a turkey hen over my shoulder, and the first thing I see from the edge of the square is him, halfway up a ladder, shirt stuck to his back, arguing with Thom about a beam.
"It's crooked," Peeta says.
"It's a beam," Thom says. "It's supposed to hold up a roof, not win a prize."
"It's crooked by about a finger. I'll see it every morning for the rest of my life."
"Then don't look up."
I stop at the corner where the old sweet shop used to be and watch. Seven springs since the fire, and the square still looks like a mouth that's lost some teeth. The Justice Building is new stone, too pale, like a bandage. The Hob is gone for good. But there is a bakery going up exactly where the Mellark bakery stood, on the same footprint, and the man on the ladder is the one who threw me a burnt loaf in the rain the year my family was starving. I don't say that last part out loud. He doesn't like it when people turn him into a story, and neither do I.
Peeta sees me and his whole face changes. It still does that. Years now, and I still don't know what to do with it.
"Katniss. Tell Thom the beam is crooked."
I tilt my head and squint. "The beam is crooked."
"Thank you."
"I can't see it," I tell Thom. "I'm just on his side."
Thom throws his hands up and goes to find a wedge. Peeta comes down the ladder the careful way, prosthetic first, testing each rung before he trusts it. He trusts very few things on the first try anymore. Neither do I. It's one of the reasons we work.
"Turkey," he says, looking at my shoulder. "Is that for us or for Sae?"
"Half and half. The rabbits are for Haymitch's geese to stare at."
"They'll love that." He wipes his hands on a rag that makes them dirtier and nods toward the back of the building. "Come see. It came on the morning train."
Under a tarp at the back, where the kitchen will be, sits an oven. It is not a small oven. It is black iron and brick-lined and has two doors and a firebox big enough that Buttercup could live in it, which he would, out of spite. Tied to one handle is a card in ink the color of a ripe plum.
A proper oven for a proper baker. It is a big, big day. Do try to be on time for things. With love, E.T.
"She had it shipped from the Capitol," Peeta says. "Do you know what that costs?"
"Effie doesn't know what anything costs. She knows what things are worth." I run my hand along the iron. It's cold and smells of machine oil and something sharper underneath. "When do you light it?"
"Not yet. You don't just light a new oven." He says it the way other men talk about horses. "You cure it. Small fires first, a few nights running, so the brick drinks the heat slowly and doesn't crack. Then a real fire. Then bread." He hesitates. "The first real fire matters. My dad used to say an oven remembers its first fire."
"That's not true."
"It's a little true."
I look at him. There's flour in his eyebrow already, and there hasn't been any flour on this site for seven years, so I don't know how he's managed it. There's also a folded envelope sticking out of his back pocket, heavy cream paper, the kind nobody in the district can afford, with a corner of red wax showing.
He sees me see it. He pushes it deeper into his pocket and says, "Let's go home. I'm starving."
Home is two houses in the Victors' Village that face each other across a strip of grass, and which one we mean by it depends on the night. Mostly it means his. I still keep my things in mine. My mother's medicine cabinet, my father's hunting jacket, Prim's goat's old bell on a nail by the door. Dr. Aurelius, on the phone, calls this "maintaining a separate space." I call it not having decided anything.
Haymitch arrives while the turkey is roasting, the way he arrives every time something is roasting, trailing three geese who follow him up Peeta's front steps as if they own the mortgage.
"Not in the house," Peeta says.
"They're family."
"They bit Katniss last week."
"She bit first." Haymitch drops into a kitchen chair and looks at me with eyes that are clearer than they used to be. He drinks less. Not none, but less, and he keeps the geese, and between the two of them the geese seem to be winning. "Sweetheart. You look like you strangled something today."
"Two somethings. And a turkey."
"Saves me the trouble." He reaches for the bread on the table and Peeta moves it out of range without looking, the way you'd move a candle away from a cat. "Plutarch called me again. Third time this week. He calls me when you two don't pick up the phone, and you two never pick up the phone, so I've become his very favorite person." He takes an apple instead and bites it loudly. "He wants to know if you've read his letter."
The kitchen goes quiet in that particular way. Peeta stirs the gravy that doesn't need stirring.
"What letter," I say, though I know which one. Cream paper. Red wax.
Peeta sets down the spoon. When he turns around he doesn't lie, and I notice that, because there was a time when he was the best liar I ever met. He could talk an audience of the whole country into crying. Now he mostly just tells me things, even when they're hard, even when I'd rather not hear them. The Capitol took a lot from him and somehow left that.
"It's the anniversary next month," he says. "Of the end. Plutarch wants to do a broadcast. Where are they now, that kind of thing. He wants to film the bakery opening and do an interview with us. With me." He pauses. "In exchange, the Ministry funds a new wing for the clinic. A real surgery. A pharmacy. Beds that aren't cots."
The district clinic is three rooms and a doctor who comes on the train twice a month. Last winter a miner's wife died of a fever that Prim could have broken with a kettle and a handful of willow bark.
I hear myself say, "No."
"I know."
"We're not doing it. We're not their story anymore. We're not the star-crossed anything. They can find somebody else to cry over."
"I know," Peeta says again, gently. "I already told him no."
Something in my chest unclenches. Across the table, Haymitch chews his apple and watches Peeta for a long moment, and then he looks at me, and his face says absolutely nothing, which with Haymitch is the loudest thing a face can say.
The first curing fire is that night. Peeta says he wants to do it after dark, when the square is empty and nobody's around to give him advice, and I go with him because I always go with him on fire nights, though neither of us has ever said why.
He builds it small. A fist of kindling, three sticks of split pine, the oven doors open so the brick can breathe. I sit on an upturned crate and watch the light come up orange against the new walls. Above us the stars show through the bones of the roof. It's almost pretty. Then the pine catches properly and the smell rolls out, resin and smoke and hot iron, and I watch it hit him.
He doesn't fall. He never falls anymore. He grips the edge of the workbench with both hands and stands very still, and his knuckles go white, and his eyes go somewhere I can't follow. I know what he's seeing. This exact spot. This exact smell. A bakery full of people he loved, and a sky full of Capitol planes, and a fire that didn't stay in any oven.
I get up slowly. I don't touch him yet. Touching him too soon is like grabbing a snare that hasn't sprung.
"Your name is Peeta Mellark," I say. "You're twenty-four years old. You live in the Victors' Village. Real or not real."
His jaw works. "Real."
"You're building a bakery. The beam is crooked by about a finger."
A breath that's almost a laugh. "Real."
"The fire's in the oven. It's staying in the oven. It's small and you built it and you can put it out with one bucket. Real or not real."
He looks at the firebox. At the bucket by his foot, which I filled at the pump on the way here without telling him. His hands loosen on the bench, one finger at a time.
"Real," he says.
I put my hand on his back then, flat between his shoulder blades, and feel him breathing under it, too fast and then slower. We stand there until the pine burns down to coals. He doesn't say thank you. I don't want him to.
After a while he turns his head and looks at me. "You're shaking."
"I'm not."
"Real or not real. You're shaking."
I look at my free hand. It is, a little. "Real," I admit, and he takes it and holds it against his chest, and the coals tick in the brick, and neither of us says anything else.
He falls asleep fast that night, the way he does after an episode, as if his body has run a long way. I don't. I lie in his bed and listen to the house settle and think about cream paper and Haymitch's face, and finally I get up and go downstairs to the kitchen, where we keep the book.
It started as my father's plant book, his drawings of every root and leaf a person could eat or heal with. After the war we made it into something else. Peeta paints the pictures and I write the words, and we fill it with the people we lost, every detail we can remember so the remembering doesn't fall out of our heads. Prim. Finnick. Cinna. Rue. Pages and pages. Some nights it helps. Some nights we can only look at the cover.
I mean to open it to Prim. Instead, it falls open near the back, to a page I've never seen.
It's Peeta's work, unmistakably. He's painted an oven door, open, coals glowing in that way only he can do with color, so you can almost feel the heat on your face. In front of it, two pairs of hands hold a long iron fork between them. One pair is broad and scarred across the knuckles with old burns. The other is narrower, calloused at the fingertips where a bowstring sits. On the end of the fork, a small round loaf is browning over the coals.
Underneath, in his careful lettering, it says only: Real or not real?
And then nothing. The rest of the page is blank, as if he got that far and couldn't decide how to finish the question.
I don't need him to finish it. I know what a toasting is. Everyone in the Seam does. Two people build their first fire together and toast the first bread from it and share it between them, and after that they're married. No Justice Building, no papers, no Capitol cameras. Just the fire and the bread and the two people who say so.
I sit at the kitchen table with my hand flat on the page until the window goes gray, and I still don't know what my answer would be.