Chapter 357- A Mother’s Bakery
The front window fogged faintly from the inside.
One customer was leaving as he watched — the bell over the door catching the light as it swung open, a woman with a shopping bag disappearing around the corner.
He tracked her exit.
Then his eyes moved to the window.
One figure inside. Moving between the counter and the oven.
He studied the shop for exactly three seconds.
Then he stepped off the edge of the tower.
He fell straight down.
Not in a controlled way — not the measured descent of someone with power who is choosing to fall. He went ’limp’, completely limp, the way a body goes when it has stopped arguing with gravity, and he simply dropped, hair pushed back from his face by the speed of it, expression open and almost peaceful.
The roof of the bakery received him.
CRASH.
The sound was enormous in a small space.
Plaster dust. A crack running from the new hole in the ceiling outward in three directions like a star. Fragments of roofing tile clattering off the display case, off the wooden counter, off the top shelf of hand-painted tin bread boxes that rocked and settled.
A woman screamed.
High, clean, the pure involuntary scream of a person who has not had time to decide how to react and so their body has decided for them.
"—FAILED! Failed — what— what happened? What — a ’dead body’ — "
Raven hit the bakery floor.
There was a second crash, softer — his knees, his palms on tile — and then stillness.
He was crouched in the middle of the bakery floor.
Dust settling around him in slow, golden clouds, lit by the morning light now pouring directly through the ceiling he had introduced.
He straightened.
One hand rose to his hair. He ruffled it — two passes, unhurried — the same gesture a man makes when he comes in from the rain.
He looked around.
The smell of the place arrived properly: butter, something sweet and cardamom-spiced, warm dough, the faint char of something that had been in the oven a few minutes longer than intended.
He turned.
She was standing behind the counter.
A woman in her mid-forties, thick through the shoulders and hips, the kind of dense, warm solidity that comes from a life of early mornings and physical work. Her apron was flour-dusted — white against dark blue — tied twice around a waist that was generously, honestly round, the bow at her back slightly crooked.
Her face was a complete map of shock.
Eyes wide. One hand braced against the counter. Her mouth open on the tail end of the scream that had just finished, chest still heaving with the breath that had launched it.
In her other hand: a pastry.
A round, glossy thing — egg-washed and golden, the kind she’d been making since before this man was born — held out at arm’s length as if it were a weapon, or an offering, or simply the last thing she’d had in her hand when the world stopped making sense.
Raven blinked at her.
Took her in.
The flour on her jaw. The crooked apron bow. The wide, dark eyes still recalibrating.
"Aren’t you Gareth’s mother?"
His voice was conversational. Not a question in any urgent sense — more the tone of a man who has just run into someone at the market and is confirming a detail.
The woman blinked.
Once. Twice.
Her mouth worked.
"’What.’"
Not a question either. More the sound a person makes when a word arrives but the surrounding context has completely collapsed.
"’Who’ — " She shook her head. "Who ’are’ you. You just — from the ’ceiling’ — you fell — "
She was processing. Visibly processing — he could see it happen, the sequence of it crossing her face: the shock recalibrating toward confusion toward the beginning of indignation.
And then — because a woman’s body does not ask permission, because shock tends to remove the polite intermediary between attention and honesty — her eyes moved.
They moved the way eyes move when they have not been given a specific instruction to look at a thing and so they simply do.
Down.
Past his chest. Past his stomach. Past the line of dark hair below his navel.
They landed.
Stayed for exactly two seconds longer than they should have.
The pastry fell.
It made a soft, definitive sound on the tile floor — the small flat sound of a thing that had been held carefully and then, without any particular drama, stopped being held.
She looked back up.
Her face was composed with a speed and precision that suggested the composure was an emergency measure.
"Pervert."
The word came out flat and simple, the way things come out when you need one word to cover a great deal of territory.
Raven looked at the pastry on the floor.
Then at her face.
Then, very briefly, down at himself — with the detached acknowledgement of a man remembering a detail he had genuinely deprioritized.
He looked back up.
He did not look embarrassed. He looked, if anything, faintly curious, the way a man looks when a situation has introduced a variable he finds mildly interesting.
"I need clothes," he said.
Not an apology. Not an explanation. Just an assessment of the immediate problem.
The woman opened her mouth.
Then closed it.
Then opened it again.
Her hand found the counter behind her and held it, not because she needed the support but because the counter was there and familiar and this entire morning had required that something be familiar.
"You," she said, pointing — and her finger had the kind of authority that only comes from years of pointing that finger at people and having them listen, "are going to ’explain’."
Raven considered this.
"Probably not," he said, "in any order you’ll find satisfying." He looked at the ceiling — at the blue sky now visible through the hole, pale and ordinary and Wednesday-morning-shaped — and then back at her.
"But I’ll take tea, if you have it."
The woman stared at him.
Her apron bow was still crooked.
The pastry was still on the floor.
The hole in her ceiling let in a single clean column of morning air that smelled like the city waking up, and somewhere in the back of the shop, in the oven, something was browning a degree past where it should have been.
She looked at him for a long, assessing moment — the kind of look that catalogs a great deal of information very quickly.
Then she reached beneath the counter, without breaking eye contact, and produced a folded length of cloth — the spare apron she kept for assistants.
She held it out.
"Cover yourself," she said. "And then I’ll decide whether to call the police."
Raven took the apron.
He looked at it.
Looked at her.
And then threw the first hook.
"I am from future and Gareth’s life is in danger."
’!’
"What kind of nonsense..." the woman’s mouth twitched. Currently, as he was actually thinking of calling the police, trying to understand how he fell from such a height and was uninjured, suddenly his words short-circuited her mind, making her realize that this guy actually fell and lost his mind.
"Jennifer, you have to listen to me... Gareth’s life would be in danger if you do not—"
"Shut up! Who are you and... no, I am calling the police!