By the Grace of the Gods (LN) - Volume 11 - Chapter SS2

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A Worker’s Reminiscence

“Are you ready, dear?”

“Yeah...”

“New town, same old you, huh.”

“Sorry...”

“Don’t worry about it. I’ll open up the shop.”

I watched as my wife chuckled and left the kitchen. Another typical morning for us. A quiet moment for us in the midst of our peaceful days... A precious moment that I had previously taken for granted.

I couldn’t help but remember it all when I was alone. Until a few months ago, I’d been running a bakery in a town called Rohalt. Thanks to my perseverance, the bakery had gotten quite popular, enough for me to take on an apprentice. It seemed like the years flew by. Before I knew it, I had married a woman my parents set me up with.

I was happy. Everything was going well. So when it all came crashing down, that made it all the more devastating.

One day, a debt collector came knocking at our door and slammed a loan agreement I didn’t recognize on the counter. My apprentice had betrayed me. I had trusted him, and by that time, I’d spent more time with him than with my wife. He was smart, which was why I had him on bookkeeping duty. He took advantage of that to take out loan after loan on the bakery’s dime.

I couldn’t believe it at first, and tried to talk to him, but he was already gone. The debt collector told me that they had gone to my apprentice numerous times before.

I tried going through the Merchant’s Guild, only to find more evidence of the loans and his betrayal. I found out about it all too late.

To keep my newlywed wife out of it, I sold the bakery to pay for most of the loans, and left my wife with a letter and divorce papers. I jumped onto the next carriage to start a new day job. To be honest, I didn’t care where the carriage was headed.

I didn’t care much what I did after arriving at Gimul, either. I interviewed at all the places the Merchant’s Guild told me to and began working at the trash plant. I felt disgusted with myself, no matter how many times I went over what I’d done that day, until...

In the dining hall, I took my seat without taking the bread they were handing out. I couldn’t stand the sight of bread. A child kindly called to me, but I yelled back, “Get that sorry excuse for bread out of my face!”

In hindsight, I had already stepped into the trap. That kid was none other than the one in charge of the entire trash plant. He wasn’t just the man in charge’s kid, he was the man in charge. My friends back home wouldn’t have believed it.

The kid, Ryoma, approached me like a normal kid doing me a favor. In the end, he made me agree to run the bakery in the dining hall, of all places. After I blurted out that I could bake better bread than that, I couldn’t back down.

Thanks to him, I gained a new reason to bake. I hated the work at first, but as I continued baking, I began to think about my former apprentice and my wife, but mostly about the past. The dedicated faces of my old man baking bread, and my mother selling it. What I remembered the most fondly, though, were our customers’ smiles. It was fun to watch them come and go, and it made me happy. I took pride in them, even as a kid, hence why I never felt like all my helping out with the bakery, or the work I did to inherit it, was a chore.

Once I stopped hating my work in the dining hall, Ryoma surprised me once again. He showed up one day like always, except my wife was with him. It took me a while to figure out what was going on, but my wife had no intention of leaving me. She had come to Gimul in search of work herself, and had been looking for me. She knew she would find me as soon as she learned which agency had brought me to Gimul. She was planning to work while looking for me around town, but luckily she’d met Ryoma during her interview, and things just went from there.

It turned out that Ryoma had told her to wait before coming to see me. I had been so dispirited that he didn’t expect a joyful reunion. Looking back on how I felt before I started baking again, I couldn’t argue with the kid.

Ryoma left us alone, and we talked well into the night. I felt so guilty that I wanted to bury myself alive.

I hadn’t met my wife before my parents introduced me to her, but she had frequented my parents’ bakery when we were younger, and had felt affection for the kid glued to the oven.

Not only had my wife been searching for me without signing the divorce papers I left her, but she had begged her parents to pay off the rest of the loan for us. It wasn’t enough to buy back our bakery, but she told me that we needed only to repay her parents at a reasonable pace. No words could express my gratitude. I wanted to make it up to her somehow, but there wasn’t much I could do. Fortunately, I did have a job, and was in a situation where I could work hard for the money. I resolved to give it my all at baking, with my wife by my side.

Each morning, when I got the bakery in the dining hall ready for opening, my past came back to me, and struck me with regret...but then I remembered what I was working for, and it gave me the motivation I needed.