Slow afternoon. The lunch rush had been a trickle — four customers, three pizzas sold. The early evening wasn't looking much better. I'd already prepped dough for tomorrow.
The kitchen was clean. The floor was swept. Al was kneading. He'd gotten good at it.
His hands moved with a rhythm that wasn't there a month ago. Push, fold, turn. Push, fold, turn. Steady.
Patient. I was leaning against the prep table, watching. Not saying anything. He glanced up.
"Something on your mind, sir?"
"Just curious."
"About?"
I shrugged. "You never really said how you ended up here. In Bolexe. A butler for a noble house, then off to work in a pizzeria with some lunatic."
His hands kept moving.
Push, fold, turn. "I was born in a small village," he said. "South of Bolexe. About a day's ride. You wouldn't know it."
"Try me."
"Oakwell."
"Fifty families. A mill. A tavern that served the same stew for forty years."
"Sounds charming."
"It was small. I was orphaned young."
"Don't remember much of my parents. Just ... fragments. A voice. The smell of bread."
He said it flat. No self-pity. Just fact. "The Foxton household took me in as a stable boy. I slept with the horses for the first three years."
"How old were you?"
"Seven."
"Maybe eight. I don't know exactly." The dough absorbed his weight. Soft, elastic, alive. "I worked my way up," he said. "Stable to kitchen. Kitchen to hall. Hall to butler. It took fifteen years."
"Fifteen years to become a butler."
"Another fifteen years to become trusted."
I let that sit. "Did you ever think about leaving? Before all this?" He was quiet for a moment.
The only sound was the dough pressing into the marble. That steady push and fold rhythm. It was almost hypnotic. I watched his knuckles work the gluten, watched the flour dust float up and catch the lantern light.
"No, sir. I didn't."
"Why not?"
He stopped kneading. Looked down at his hands, dusted in flour. He held them up, palms open, like he was seeing them for the first time. "Because I didn't know there was anything worth leaving for."
I let that sit. Tried to imagine it.
A whole life spent in one house, one city, one set of rooms, never once thinking about the door. I'd spent my whole life running from things. The idea of staying felt foreign. Like a language I'd never learned.
"Fifteen years as a stable boy," I said. "Another fifteen as a butler. That's a long time to be invisible."
He didn't answer right away. Just picked the dough back up and started kneading. Push, fold, turn.
Push, fold, turn. "It's longer when you're not," he said quietly.
---
I didn't push after that. We worked in silence for a while. I sliced mushrooms. He portioned dough.
The hourglass on the shelf marked the intervals. The only sounds were the knife against the board and the soft slap of dough on marble. Comfortable sounds. Kitchen sounds.
I found myself thinking about my own past. The parts I remembered, anyway. A cramped apartment over a laundromat. A foster home with five other kids and a TV that only got three channels.
A diner where I washed dishes at sixteen, where the fry cook taught me how to crack an egg one-handed. I'd never told anyone that. Never had anyone to tell.
Then Al spoke again. "Life is strange, sir."
"Yeah, it is."
"I never expected to leave Bolexe. I had a room. A duty. A purpose. It wasn't much, but it was mine."
"And now?"
He resumed kneading. Push, fold, turn. The motion was effortless. "Now I work in a place that sells food I'd never heard of, for a baron's son who somehow learned to cook magic, using ingredients that glow."
I winced. "They don't glow."
"A faint shimmer, then. Blue."
"They do not shimmer."
He gave me a look. The kind that said I've been doing this long enough to know what I saw.
I sighed. "Fine. Sometimes a faint shimmer."
He nodded, satisfied. "I don't know what happened to you, sir. Or why you changed so much. But I know you're a decent cook. And decent to work for. That's enough for me."
I didn't have a response to that.
---
He finished the last piece of dough, shaped it into a neat ball, and set it in the proofing tray. Then he reached up to the shelf and flipped the hourglass. Perfect timing. The last few grains of sand fell just as the glass turned.
"Getting better at that," I said.
"The rhythm is predictable, sir."
"And everything else?"
He wiped his hands on his apron. Looked around the kitchen. The stacked pans. The cooling oven. The single candle flickering on the counter. "Everything else," he said, "I learn as I go."
I smiled. "Me too."
He nodded. Went back to the dishes. I stood there a moment longer, watching him work, and thought about Oakwell. A village I'd never see, with a mill and a tavern and the smell of bread.
Somewhere in this world, a boy had lost his parents and slept with horses. And now he was here. In my kitchen. Flipping hourglasses.
I wondered what my own past looked like from the outside. A guy with no history before six months ago. No family. No hometown. No records. Just a pizza oven and a stack of ingredients that glowed blue.
Al had a village. A dead family. Fifteen years of service. He was solid. Grounded. He had roots, even if they were torn.
I had nothing. I'd landed in this world like a stone dropped in a pond. Ripples going out, but nothing pulling me down. Maybe that was the difference between us.
He stayed because he found something. I stayed because I had nowhere else to go.
Life was strange.