I walked to the back of the pantry and took down a single thing: an old cast-iron bread mold, heavy and dark with age.

Long before there was a company, before there was Zane, I had a small and stubborn dream of a bakery — the chemistry of yeast, the heat of an oven, the plain pleasure of making something warm with my hands.

When I mentioned it once, Christina called it a low-class waste of time for a corporate wife, and Zane said he’d support it “someday,” after his next promotion, and never lifted a finger.

So with my share of the sale I did not buy another house.

I leased a bright, sunlit space on the ground floor of my new building and spent weeks on it, and I opened a bakery — drip coffee, fruit pastries, warm golden cornbread.

I did not need it to earn a dollar.