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brand-new, nor did Jack have borrowing privileges at the village library; the fines for his overdue books had become too steep for Maeve in spite of her friendship with the head librarian. As Jack waxed poetic on the finer plot points of the book, all of which were correct and astute, Maeve’s mind wandered back. A week ago Saturday. Jack wanted to know what would be the big deal about that day, but she would never tell him, even though he would forget anyway.
    She wondered how long it would be before he asked again, because it was the night that Sean Donovan had gone out for a gallon of milk supposedly and ended up with a hole in his head he didn’t need. Some things the old guy just didn’t need to know.

 
    CHAPTER 5
    Maeve started her day earlier than anyone she knew: her alarm went off a little past four thirty, and she left the house at five thirty that next morning, just like always. Although she planned her days and her baking with precision, there were always things that needed to be done, coffee to start, and papers to arrange so that she could open at six on the dot. Her one employee, Jo, was not the most punctual, but Maeve cut her some slack. They had been friends for years and had been through a lot together: Jo’s cancer treatment, her divorce, and a host of other life experiences that neither had foreseen but both had weathered together.
    The Comfort Zone was walking distance from Maeve’s house, but she always drove. The people in the village of Farringville—a forty-minute train ride to Grand Central Station in New York City—took their morning commute seriously, and many cut it close when driving to the local train station. The last thing she needed was to be walking along a dark street in the wee hours of the morning, a speeding commuter mowing her down as she traversed the one stretch that had no sidewalk.
    The shop was dark when she entered, the only light coming from the alarm system by the back door. She thought it sounded clichéd—and it was—but this was her favorite time of the day. Once Jo arrived, her chatter filled the silence in between customer visits, and the big mixer on the table provided background music to her latest musings on the women in town and her general take on everything from the best Chinese food to be found locally to the state of Maeve’s blond hair, usually not to Jo’s liking. The empty store, the scent of fresh-baked scones part of the permanent smell that greeted her every day, was the place she most identified with the word home .
    She had set up the front of the store to resemble a café she remembered from her honeymoon in Paris, procuring spindly iron chairs and tables for customers who ate in and hanging cheap prints of scenes from the City of Lights. It was bright and sunny when the sun reflected off the nearby Hudson and displayed none of the blood, sweat, and sometimes tears that she put in every day to fill the glass-front cases with a mix of sweet and savory items: cupcakes for those who wanted a sugar rush, quiche for the harried commuter on the go who was out of ideas for dinner. Bread and rolls on the shorter side of the L-shaped counter, cookies on the long part. It was all there and it was all done by her, and when people asked how she did it all, even she couldn’t figure it out.
    As the coffee dripped into the pot, she picked up the papers that were delivered every morning and that sat on the small patio in front of the store. Various headlines bemoaned the loss of titan of industry Sean Donovan, his death still a mystery, a cause for concern among the people who lived in the neighborhood where he had been killed. One of the headlines was tawdry and unnecessary, putting a voice to the fact that he was not where he should have been, another focusing only on the devastated family, the sordid nature of the story buried in the last paragraph. She closed the papers and folded them flat, then stuck them beneath a large stack so that no one would know