Chloe in Willowmere

The cardboard box had been sitting in the back storeroom since Marco's father passed — unremarkable, unlabeled, easy to overlook. When Chloe finally asks about it during one of their archive-gathering sessions, Marco opens it almost reluctantly, kneeling on the flour-dusty floor. What he finds stops the room. Black-and-white photographs of the bakery as it was in the late 1940s: the same arched windows, the same brick exterior, but younger — and in the doorway, a proud older man in a white apron. His grandfather. A hand-painted sign reads 'Rossi's Bakery — Est. 1949.' Marco had known the bakery was old, but he'd never known it was this old, or that his grandfather had stood in that doorway before him. Chloe sits down beside him on the storage room floor and does the math quietly: seventy-seven years. Neither of them says much after that. They don't need to.