I have eaten a great many of Jacqueline’s loaves in the years since, every kind her heritage grains can produce, and they are all delicious.

But that first one, torn apart with our fingers at the kitchen counter in the golden light of the day I was so spectacularly wrong, will always be the one I remember best.

Down the hall, the guest room sat empty and full of clean autumn sunlight, waiting patiently to become the office I had dreamed of on that very first morning, back when I still thought the worst thing in that room was a smell I could not place.

And on the kitchen windowsill, catching the afternoon light, sat a small glass jar Jacqueline had pressed into my hands before she left, labeled in her careful little hand, R-07, a pinch of her twenty-year-old starter, a living piece of her passed quietly into my keeping, mine now, bubbling away happily in the afternoon sun.