The Horrible Ex-Exchange

I'm Isa, I'm twenty-five, and I'm in Lisbon because I'm petty. That's the honest setup, no way around it.

Two years with Declan, from when I was twenty-one to twenty-three. Same pastry school, same ugly dorm kitchen, same stupid dream of opening our own place someday. Then he took a job in Lisbon and told me by text. A text. Three lines, one of them was "sorry." I didn't cry, mostly. I did throw a bench scraper at the wall and now there's a mark on my apartment wall that my landlord thinks came with the place.

So when a café near the Alfama district offered me a month-long pop-up bakery, I said yes before I finished reading the email. I told everyone it was the opportunity. The light, the cobblestones, the custard tarts. It was not the opportunity. It was spite with a plane ticket.

My rented kitchen is one room off a narrow street where trams clatter past every eleven minutes, I timed it out of boredom. It smells like vanilla and old stone. There's a starter in the corner named Finn that I saved from my school days, and he's honestly doing better than I am. The first morning I stood there in my apron with flour on my forearms and thought, well. Here I am. In the city my ex moved to without telling me. To prove a point to a man who may not even remember the point.

Then on day three I walked into a pastel de nata shop three streets over and there he was. Twenty-six now, taller hair, same stupid forearms, holding a nata like it owed him money.

"Oh, you have got to be kidding me," he said.

"Hello, Declan."

"You're following me."

"You don't have a copyright on custard, Declan. This is Portugal. Everyone's here."

Ali was with me, which is important. Ali is twenty-seven, my best friend since a baking class six years ago, freelance food writer, professional chaos enjoyer. She had her phone out before either of us finished a sentence.

"This is gold," she said, filming. "Say more mean things, the lighting is great."

I want it noted that we were adults being ridiculous. We were two adults in our twenties insulting each other's lamination technique in a pastry shop while a stranger behind the counter pretended to restock cups.

"Your croissants were always overworked," I told him. "Dense. You treat dough like it insulted your family."

"Your sourdough tastes like sour for the sake of sour," he said. "You made bread people ate out of politeness."

"People loved my bread."

"People lied to you. It's called kindness."

"You wouldn't know kindness, you broke up with me by text."

"Okay, wow, in front of my nata?"

Ali zoomed in. "This is going in the article. Working title, 'Ex-Exchange: A Baker Walks Into Her Ex's City.'"

"Delete that," we both said, at the same time, which was somehow worse than anything else that happened.

I bought my natas and left with as much dignity as a person can have while a tram bell dings behind them.

The bake-off was Keith's idea, which surprised me, because when I met him I figured he was the sensible one. Keith is twenty-nine, Declan's flatmate and a waiter at the café, and he looks as though he has mediated a lot of arguments about whose turn it is to buy dish soap.

He came by my pop-up on a Thursday, ordered a loaf, ate half of it standing up, and said, "Okay. Listen. He won't shut up about you. You won't shut up about him. There's a neighborhood festival in the square in two weeks. There's a taste-off table. I'm putting you both in it."

"A bake-off," I said.

"A friendly bake-off."

"Nothing about this is friendly."

"Look, it's for the neighborhood. Locals judge. Winner gets a stupid wooden spoon that's been in the café's drawer since before I worked there. It's genuinely worthless. Please. I live with him. I hear about your puff pastry at breakfast."

I should have said no. Let me be clear that the mature move was no. But he said "he won't shut up about you" and something in my chest went, oh, he talks about me, and I hated that something, and the only way to punish it was to say yes.

"Fine," I said. "Tell him I'm going to destroy him."

"Great," Keith said, in the voice of a man who has to live with the fallout. "I'll tell him you said hi, actually, and he can infer the rest."

Declan agreed, apparently, out of pure pride. Keith told me this over text. "he said quote 'she can't out-bake me in my own timezone' end quote. Hope you're happy. I'm not."

The terms stayed vague, which should have been my first warning. Nobody set a date, a category, or rules. Two bakers, one square, one wooden spoon. What could go wrong.

Here's what went wrong. Day six, my starter was perfect, my schedule was perfect, and I picked up my flour order from the supplier and something was off. The gluten was weak. Not bad flour exactly, just not the flour I'd ordered, the good stuff, the one the supplier and I had negotiated about with his English and my terrible Portuguese and a lot of hand gestures. I got the house brand. The kind that makes dough slump like it's tired of your dreams.

I asked around. Ali, who has no shame, asked the supplier's nephew, who is twenty-one actually and works the counter, and he laughed and said, oh, the case of port? A tall foreign guy brought a case of port last week and the order changed after that.

A case of port. Declan bribed my flour supplier. With port. In Portugal. Where port is from. The pettiest bribery in the history of baking.

Ali was thrilled. "This is the best material I've ever had."

"It's sabotage."

"It's classic rivalry content. I'll frame it as 'the old ways.'"

I did not yell at anyone. I want that on some kind of record. I did something better. Declan keeps his yeast in the café storeroom, and the café and my kitchen share a supplier's loading alley on delivery mornings, and doors in this city are never locked, this is the one thing I'll say for Lisbon. So on day seven, before dawn, with flour still on my sleeves, I moved his yeast packets. All of them. Every last packet, into a paper bag, into a cupboard in my kitchen behind the good vanilla.

Not stolen. Relocated. He'd find them eventually. Weeks, maybe. Let him try to proof anything. Let him blame the humidity.

He texted me that afternoon, which I did not expect, because we had each other's numbers from before and neither of us had deleted the other, which is its own kind of pathetic.

"my dough is dead. What did you do."

"Port is a lovely gift, Declan. Very generous."

"you're unhinged."

"you started it. With a text. Two years ago."

He left me on read after that, which means somewhere in that café he was standing in his storeroom counting empty shelves, and I sat on my flour sack and laughed alone in my kitchen until Finn the starter jar wobbled from the vibration, or the tram went past, one of those.

Ali photographed my laughing face for the article. She said it was the first honest expression I'd made since we landed.

The festival was in seven days. My flour was garbage and my conscience was, honestly, fine.

The thing about sabotage, though, is this. Karma has a baking schedule.

On day eight my oven died. Not slowly, not with a warning light, just a pop from the back panel and then cold stone where heat used to be. I was four hours into a proof, Finn fed and happy, and I turned the dial and got nothing. I turned it again. Nothing. I said a word Ali taught me in Portuguese that she claimed meant oven repair but I suspect means something ruder.

I called the landlord, who called someone, who said five days, maybe seven, before I get a part. Five to seven days. Six days to the festival.

I sat down on the flour sack and thought about crying, and then thought about who would find out I cried, and decided against it on those grounds alone. Ali came in around noon, took one look at the dead oven and the untouched dough and said, "You have to ask him."

"No!"

"You have to."

"I'd rather bake everything on the tram's engine block."

"He has a working oven and you have six days and no flour and no yeast, wait, you have his yeast." She opened the cupboard and looked at the paper bag like it was a hostage. "Give it back. Ask him. Frame it as a trade."

"I'm not trading with him."

"You're negotiating with him. It's different. It's business."

It took me the whole afternoon and two glasses of wine to type the text. "oven died. 5-7 days. You want your yeast back, I want kitchen