The 2PM Cakery #3

The six months of self-isolation began quite simply. It started almost right after her mother’s death—well, technically not immediately, since she had to deal with the funeral and the police investigations. But once all of that was over, she no longer had much reason to go out.

The first day, she slept on the kitchen floor.

It wasn’t intentional. She had meant to make tea. She had meant to eat something. But the mug never made it off the counter, and somewhere between her body folding in on itself and the silence swallowing her whole, she just... stopped moving.

Morning bled into afternoon. Then evening.

She didn’t answer her phone. She didn’t turn on the lights. And when a knock finally came—gentle, uncertain, like someone testing the weight of her grief—she stayed completely still, pretending to be someone who no longer lived there.

The second day, someone left a bag of groceries on her doorstep. No note. Just bread, peanut butter, and the kind of boxed soup she used to eat in college when she couldn’t afford anything else. She didn’t know who sent it. But on the third day, it happened again. This time with apples. Crackers. Toilet paper.

After that, she stopped asking questions.

Honestly, she never meant to stay inside. It just became easier. There were no bloodstains here, no yellow tape, no faint scent of iron clinging to the walls. This house—the one she’d moved into just a few months before her life detonated—felt like the only thing untouched. Which made it the only place she could still breathe.

You might ask why her mother's death left such a mark.

There was no correct answer, really. She hadn’t been home when it happened—a detail that seemed to matter to people for some reason. The police. The lawyers. The nosy neighbors who suddenly started treating her like a cautionary tale. As if not being there somehow made it better. As if arriving twenty minutes after the screaming stopped was a blessing. 

They didn’t see what she saw. They didn’t walk into the hallway of her parents’ house and find her mother’s phone on the floor next to a smear of something dark and wet. They didn’t follow it into the kitchen.

Her mother was already gone. The paramedics told her later that the wound was fatal. Immediate. She hadn’t suffered. But she must’ve. In some way. Because there was shattered glass in the sink, and blood on the refrigerator door, and the look on her father’s face when he turned to see her standing there—that had to mean something. 

There was no rage left in him by then. No panic. Just... resignation. Like he already knew where this ended.

He said her name once. Just once. Quietly. Then he sat down on the floor and waited for the police to arrive.

She hadn’t said a word to him since.

Some days, she wondered if it would’ve been easier if he’d run, or screamed, or denied it, or begged her to believe it wasn’t him. But he hadn’t done any of that. He’d just looked at her like the damage had already been done—and then sat in his own wreckage like a man who’d finally stopped pretending to hold himself together.

All in all, she hadn’t stepped outside since all those havoc. Not because she couldn’t. More because she didn’t know how to be a person after that.

*to be continued*

The 2 PM Cakery #2

She didn’t move. Not at first. This was the kind of knock that echoed like it didn’t belong to a friend—or a stranger with good intentions. It clung to the atmosphere long after it stopped, like it knew it had unsettled her. Like it wanted to be heard again, inside her head, louder than her thoughts. Three knocks. No doorbell. No follow-up. Just... awkward waiting.

She edged toward the door on instinct. Through the peephole, nothing. Just the porch she hadn’t stepped out on in six months and the crooked doormat that used to say “Welcome” before the letters faded. 

She opened the door—just a crack—something was there. A box. Small, white, with a string tied tight like an old-school bakery ribbon. No note this time. No signature. But the smell hit her instantly: cinnamon, nutmeg, and a hint of orange zest. She hadn’t smelled that combination since—

Her throat closed. Since her. Since before the night everything had gone still.

She brought the box inside like it was radioactive, setting it gently beside the paper bag. Her fingers hovered over the string, hesitant, or perhaps scared. That pulling it might unravel more than just a knot. 

Her mother used to tie cake boxes with the same kind of string. Not because she had to—her packaging was clean and modern—but because she said it made people feel like they were taking something home from childhood. Nostalgia, she used to call it. That word hurt now.

After a few seconds, she untied the string anyway. She was never good with refraining curiosity.

Inside were two slices of spice cake. Not store-bought. Not from any bakery she knew. The frosting was uneven, like someone had used the back of a spoon, and the cake was a little lopsided. But the smell—it was familiar. 

She reached out before she could stop herself. Warm. Fresh. Someone must had intentionally baked it that morning. Someone must had knew the cake would intrigued her.

She looked around her silent kitchen, heart thudding.

No explanation. Just the cake. 

And a little question in her mind that refused to leave: Who still remembered her mother’s recipe?

She didn’t eat the cake. Not yet. Instead, she sat at the kitchen table with her hands in her lap, watching the slices like they might tell her a secret. 

She hadn’t let herself think about her mom in weeks—months, maybe—but now every corner of the room seemed to push her boundaries. 

The clock ticked past 2:37. She closed her eyes, not wanting to feel the horror lurking from the back of her mind.

And then her phone buzzed.

Unknown number.

One message.

Just a single line.

“You still remember how to make it, right?”

*to be continued*

The 2 PM Cakery #1

There was a ritual to it. Every day at exactly two in the afternoon, the girl behind the lace curtain would unlock the front door, reach one arm out—always just one—without showing her face and pull in the brown paper bag that someone had left on the porch. Sometimes it was soup in a thermos. Sometimes a sandwich with too many pickles. Once, it was a single cupcake with lavender frosting and too much vanilla essence. She never asked who sent them, and they never rang the bell. That was the arrangement.

The neighbors called her that sweet girl from the end of the street, though none of them had seen her face in months. Not since That Night. 

That girl—the one people whispered about when they thought she couldn't hear—sometimes she wondered if they thought she'd disappeared entirely. If the girl in the house with the shut blinds and dying mailbox was just a ghost now. She surely felt like one.

Today, she stared blankly at the paper bag as usual. Still warm. There was something wrapped in foil inside and something else beneath it—a folded note. That was new. She hadn’t gotten a note since the last time she opened her mouth to speak and found that the words stuck like dried honey on the roof of her mouth.

Her fingers hovered over the note like it might bite. It was written on lined paper, the kind that came from spiral-bound notebooks, and folded once, then again. She opened it slowly, the edges soft with smudged graphite and the faint scent of cinnamon. Just five words, scrawled in a handwriting she didn’t recognize:

You still love baking, right?

She didn’t answer. Not out loud. But her gaze flicked toward the kitchen—toward the flour-caked countertops and the half-used bag of chocolate chips that hadn't moved in weeks. Baking used to be the only thing that made the silence in her chest feel less suffocating. That was before. Now, the mixing bowls sat like fossils, frozen in time. 

She closed her eyes and let the question from the note hang in the air like it deserved no answer.

Outside, the world was moving—cars passing, children yelling from two houses down, someone mowing the lawn too early in the season. Inside her house, it was all stillness. She wondered, not for the first time, if maybe the world had split in two That Night. The normal one kept spinning, and she’d been left behind in the other.

She folded the note back up and placed it carefully on the counter, like it was something contagious. The bag of food sat untouched beside it. For a moment, she just stood there, barefoot on cold tile, the clock ticking loudly above the sink. Two o’clock. The time she used to pull fresh scones from the oven and hum along to old playlists, back when people came over without knocking. Back when her life didn’t feel like something she was borrowing, day by day.

Then came the knock.

Not the gentle kind, not the neighborly kind.

Three sharp raps. Precise. Like someone who knew exactly where she lived—and why she hadn’t left.

*to be continued*

I plan to make this a serialized story if this gets a lot of readers. Let me know if it's an interesting potential-series!