The register came up short on a Friday, and by Monday everyone on the schedule had already decided whose fault it was.
Marisol ran a small bakery — six tables, a case of morning pastries, a back room that smelled permanently of yeast and cinnamon. She'd opened it with her late husband's insurance money and eleven years of stubbornness, and she knew the arithmetic of the place the way she knew the arithmetic of a croissant: every gram accounted for, nothing to spare. So when the drawer started coming up light — nine dollars one week, twenty-two the next — and when bags of good bread flour and whole cases of European butter began evaporating from the storeroom faster than any recipe could explain, she felt it in her stomach before she felt it in the books.
The story wrote itself, the way these stories do. The shortfalls had started around the time she'd hired Deivis — nineteen, quiet, three weeks in the country, working the closing shift to send money home. Her most senior counter clerk, a woman named Paula who'd been there six years and whom Marisol had trusted with the keys, laid it out gently and completely: I don't like saying it, but it's the new kid. It started when he started. You do the math.
