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always remarkably in tune.
    The neighbors regarded Emilienne the way most do when confronted with the odd. Of course, this was a tad more complex than an aversion of the eyes from an unseemly mole or a severely scarred finger. Everything about Emilienne Lavender was strange. To Emilienne, pointing at the moon was an invitation for disaster, a falling broom the same. And when the Widow Marigold Pie began secretly suffering from a bout of insomnia, it was Emilienne who arrived at her door the next morning with a garland of peonies and an insistence that wearing it would ensure a restful sleep that night. Soon the quiet whispers of
witch
began following Emilienne wherever she went. And to associate with the neighborhood witch, well, that would be an invitation for a disaster much more dangerous than anything the moon might bring. So her neighbors did the only thing that seemed appropriate — they avoided Emilienne Lavender completely.
    Fortunately, they found no fault with Connor — his strange wife hardly spent any time at the bakery — and the little shop began to thrive. Connor’s success could have been ascribed to a number of things. The location was certainly part of it — no passing parishioner could help but make a stop at the bakery on the way home from church, particularly on those Sundays when Pastor Trace Graves bestowed the congregation with the Holy Communion. Body of Christ or not, one torn piece of stale bread was hardly satisfying after a morning of Lutheran hymnody. If anything, it made those freshly baked loaves of sourdough and rye, displayed in the bakery window like precious gems, all the more enticing.
    Many preferred not to acknowledge it, but Emilienne certainly played a part in the bakery’s success, if only behind the scenes. She had impeccable taste and an eye for appealing design, for flattering fabrics and colors (of course she did — she was French). She used her natural talents in choosing the butter-yellow paint for the bakery walls and the white lace valances for the windows. She arranged wrought-iron tables and chairs across the black-and-white-tiled floor, where customers sat to enjoy a morning sticky bun and the wafting scents of cinnamon and vanilla. And though all these ingredients helped build the bakery’s recipe for success, Connor’s bakery did so well because Connor was an exceptional baker.
    He’d learned from his father, who took his crippled son under his wing and taught him all there was to know about feeding the New York masses: how to make black-and-white cookies, sponge cake, rum-and-custard-filled crème puffs. When Connor married Emilienne Roux and moved to Seattle, he brought with him those same recipes and served them with panache to the people of Pinnacle Lane, who claimed to have never before tasted such decadent desserts.
    So, naturally, Connor spent most of his time at the bakery, which for Emilienne meant whittling the hours away in the big house, walking her restless womb from one room to the next, waiting for her husband to return home. For night to fall. For time to go by. As the months passed, Emilienne watched the yellowed leaves of the cherry tree in the yard rot in the autumn rain. She watched mothers walk their children to school, watched her own body change — morphing daily into something foreign and abstract, something that no longer belonged to her.
    Pregnancy proved to be a very lonely time for Emilienne even though she was never alone: not on the day she married Connor Lavender, or when she refused to leave the safe haven of the cramped sleeper car, or even when murmurs of
witch
drifted up from the neighborhood and through the house’s open windows.
They
were always there. Him with his urge to speak despite his face having been shot off, and her with a cavern in the place where her heart once beat, sometimes with that child on her hip — that phantom child with mismatched eyes. And then there was the canary.
    Only when she daydreamed that she