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Pada bulan April, cahaya kembali ke Hollin Bridge sebelum rotinya selesai matang. Ana menyadarinya suatu pagi pada pukul setengah enam, berdiri di depan meja tua itu dengan tangan terbenam di adonan terakhir malam itu: bayangan kelabu di jendela dapur yang belum ada seminggu sebelumnya, dan kemudian, di balik jembatan batu, seutas garis tipis yang nyaris keemasan. Selama lima bulan ia memanggang sepenuhnya dalam kegelapan. Kini kegelapan kian memendek di kedua ujungnya, dan sungai di belakang toko roti mulai, sangat pagi sekali, terdengar seperti musim semi.

In April the light came back to Hollin Bridge before the bread was finished. Ana noticed it one morning at half past five, standing at the old table with her hands in the last dough of the night: a greyness in the kitchen window that had not been there the week before, and then, behind the stone bridge, a thin line of something that was almost gold. For five months she had baked entirely in the dark. Now the dark was getting shorter at both ends, and the river behind the bakery had begun, very early in the morning, to sound like spring.

Ia sudah berada di Hollin Bridge selama tujuh bulan. Ia tiba dengan bus terakhir di tengah hujan membawa satu tas dan sebuah iklan di ponselnya, serta kosakata yang kemudian ia perhitungkan mungkin sekitar delapan ratus kata, sebagian besarnya kata benda. Ia masih menyimpan daftar kata baru yang ia pelajari di ponselnya, sebuah kebiasaan dari malam pertamanya, meski sekarang daftarnya sudah panjang dan ia jarang menambahkannya lagi. Kata terakhir di daftar itu, dari bulan Februari, adalah solicitor. Kata sebelum itu adalah rehabilitation. Kata pertama, yang pernah ia gulir kembali untuk memastikannya, adalah flour.

She had been in Hollin Bridge for seven months. She had arrived on the last bus in the rain with one bag and an advert on her phone, and a vocabulary, she calculated afterwards, of perhaps eight hundred words, most of them nouns. She still kept the list on her phone of the new words she learned, the habit of her first night, though it was a long list now and she rarely added to it. The last word on it, from February, was solicitor. The one before that was rehabilitation. The first, she had scrolled back once to check, was flour.

Toko roti itu kini menjadi milik kota. Hal itu tertera pada plakat kuningan kecil di samping pintu hijau, yang dipesan oleh Priya dan digosoknya setiap pagi dengan ujung kardigannya: Bell’s Bakery, milik warga Hollin Bridge, 161 orang dan terus bertambah. Penghitungan itu adalah gagasan Priya. Sekarang jumlahnya sudah mencapai seratus sembilan puluh empat. Orang-orang masih datang untuk membeli selembar saham layaknya orang membeli tiket lotre, dan Priya mencatat setiap orang di buku catatannya dengan upacara luar biasa yang sama, entah itu pengacara Helen Fenwick atau teman sekolah Grace Osei yang membawa lima puluh peni.

The bakery belonged to the town now. It said so on a small brass plate beside the green door, which Priya had commissioned and polished every morning with the end of her cardigan: Bell’s Bakery, owned by the people of Hollin Bridge, 161 of them and counting. The counting was Priya’s idea. It was up to a hundred and ninety-four. People still came in to buy a single share the way other people bought a lottery ticket, and Priya entered each one in her notebook with the same tremendous ceremony, whether it was Helen Fenwick’s solicitor or Grace Osei’s friend from school with fifty pence.

Usahanya, roti itu sendiri, dimiliki oleh tiga orang. Itu adalah gagasan Walter, dan ia bersikeras mewujudkannya dengan satu-satunya cara yang tersisa baginya, yaitu mengejanya di papannya berulang-ulang hingga semua orang mengalah. Walter Bell, yang tidak bisa memanggang roti. Michael Bell, yang memanggang lebih baik daripada siapa pun di Yorkshire dan masih belum sepenuhnya percaya bahwa ia diizinkan melakukannya. Dan Ana, yang datang melamar pekerjaan tanpa pengalaman dan telah diberitahu, pada suatu malam di bulan Januari, oleh seorang lelaki tua dengan kartu berlaminasi, bahwa ia adalah seorang rekan pemilik.

The business, the bread itself, belonged to three people. That had been Walter’s idea, and he had insisted on it in the only way left to him, which was to spell it out on his board over and over until everybody gave in. Walter Bell, who could not bake. Michael Bell, who baked better than anyone in Yorkshire and still could not quite believe he was allowed to. And Ana, who had come for a job with no experience needed and had been told, one evening in January, by an old man with a laminated card, that she was a partner.

Ia sempat membantah. Ia mengatakan bahwa ia tidak memiliki uang untuk disetorkan, tidak punya hak, bahwa ia hanyalah orang asing yang baru berada di sana selama empat bulan. Walter mendengarkan semuanya dengan ekspresi bosan yang mendalam. Kemudian ia meletakkan jarinya di atas papan dan mengeja, sangat lambat, F A M I L Y, lalu menatapnya, dan itulah akhir dari perdebatan itu, karena tidak ada jawaban untuk kata itu dalam bahasa apa pun yang diketahuinya.

She had argued. She had said she had no money to put in, no right, that she was a stranger who had been there four months. Walter had listened to all of it with an expression of deep boredom. Then he had put his finger on the board and spelled, very slowly, F A M I L Y, and looked at her, and that had been the end of the argument, because there was no answer to it in any language she knew.

Kini ia tidak lagi begitu sering menggunakan papan itu. Kata-katanya mulai kembali, perlahan-lahan, seperti rasa yang kembali ke tangan yang membeku: terasa menyakitkan, tidak sekaligus, dan sebagian di antaranya dengan urutan yang keliru. Ia bisa mengatakan ya dan tidak serta teh dan Jess. Ia bisa mengatakan tidak, bukan seperti itu, kepada Michael, pada pukul tiga pagi, dari kursinya di dekat oven, dengan rasa puas yang kentara. Ia bisa mengucapkan, jika ia berkonsentrasi, sebuah kalimat yang terdiri dari empat kata, yang, sebagaimana pernah ditunjukkan Ana kepadanya, persis sebanyak kata yang mampu ia ucapkan pada malam pertamanya di dapurnya.

He did not use the board so much now. The words were coming back, slowly, the way feeling comes back into a frozen hand: painfully, and not all at once, and some of them in the wrong order. He could say yes and no and tea and Jess. He could say no, not like that, to Michael, at three in the morning, from his chair by the oven, with considerable satisfaction. He could say, if he concentrated, a sentence of four words, which was, Ana had pointed out to him, exactly as many as she had been able to manage on her first night in his kitchen.