Not usually one for displays of emotion, Evgeniya nevertheless returned from her working vacation pink-cheeked from more than just snow exposure. Her friends, when they visited the shop, were shown a tiny pearl of ice, secreted away in the walk-in freezer, that beat like a heart and pulled the warm breath right out of their mouths. It had come from the mountains, Evgeniya explained only vaguely and with eyes already half focused on future culinary experiments, and it would allow her to freeze words, whole sentences, into something you could taste.

“I can’t decide what to name it,” Evgeniya said, scowling at the dish in her hand, proffered less like a prize and more like a puzzle. A shave ice without color might have been uninteresting, if it did not sparkle like mountaintop snow and diamonds and the pearly horns of unicorns, all blazing with an internal starlight. Jamil, blinking like one emerging into the sun suddenly, said, “I’m not sure you need to name it, or even say what flavor it is--just let people see one, and it will sell.”

When Leslie took ill and the bakery needed leadership, Evgeniya stepped up to fill those duties which did not involve ovens and piping hot bread. While the apprentices prepared the day’s offerings like always, she secreted herself in the office to manage orders of midsummer wheat, and stardust sprinkles, and five species of eggs for the dratted Egg Supreme breakfast buns she helped them brainstorm the month prior. While her shop’s esoteric ingredients came with their own vexations, at least she had never had to negotiate with a talking cuckoo who had a corner on the local market for wind eggs.

Evgeniya spent so much time either designing new recipes or cooking up the successful ones, she seldom had time or appetite to indulge in frozen confections herself, subsisting instead on sandwiches sent over by Leslie and eaten in the back office at Zelena Mishka. Sometimes, though, when the evening air felt just hot enough to soften ice cream but not melt it, she left the front counter to the kids and wandered out onto the patio. She would slurp at an ice pop that matched the sunset and tasted of grapefruit and daydreams, eating up the light and breeze as much as the sugar.