“The baker woke before dawn, as she always did, but this time the ghost was waiting at the foot of her bed — a young man she didn't recognize, still wearing the torn sleeve of a soldier's coat. She pressed her palm flat against her chest and felt her heartbeat slow to something deliberate and cold, the way it always did when she decided to listen instead of run. "Go on, then," she said, not unkindly, and the ghost opened his mouth to speak.”

“The ghost's mouth moved, but the sound came from everywhere at once — the creak of the oven door, the hiss of yesterday's ash, the thin whistle beneath the window frame where the dawn wind found a crack. *They buried me in the wrong field.* The baker lowered her hand from her chest and pulled her shawl tighter, the wool rough against her fingers in a way that reminded her she was still solid, still here. "Which field, then?" she asked, and the ghost's face did something complicated — a flinch that wasn't pain, a softening that wasn't relief — as if the question itself was more than he'd hoped for. *The one past the third oak,* he said, and the oven door groaned like it was answering for him. *Where the poppies don't grow.*”

“The baker knew the field past the third oak. Everyone did — it was the one that stayed sour no matter how many seasons the farmer rotated his crops, the one where the barley came up thin and pale as unlit candles. She nodded once, a short decisive motion that settled something in the air between them. "I can't dig tonight," she said. "But I know who can, and who'll keep his mouth shut after." The ghost's form flickered at the edges, and for a moment she saw the shape of a boy under the soldier's coat — younger than she'd first thought, young enough that the word *buried* still felt like something that shouldn't apply to him. *Tomorrow, then,* said the ash and the oven door and the crack beneath the window, and the baker tucked that word into her chest beside the slow cold heartbeat and carried it with her into the flour-dusted morning.”

“She set the bread to rise before the sun fully cleared the treeline, her hands moving through the rhythm of the work while her mind stayed fixed on the field past the third oak and the boy who needed someone to remember where he'd been put. The gravedigger lived at the edge of town in a house whose garden grew nothing but rosemary, and he answered the door with flour on his sleeves too — different flour, the kind that came from bone instead of grain, but he knew her face and he didn't ask why she'd come. *Three coppers and a loaf a week until the ground settles,* she said, and he held her gaze long enough to understand that she wasn't bargaining. He nodded once — the same short decisive motion she'd given the ghost — and reached for his coat. The baker stood in his doorway and watched him gather his tools, and she felt the cold heartbeat still sitting in her chest, steady and patient and *waiting.* It would be satisfied by morning.”