If I had hoped for an instant response to my prayers I was doomed to disappointment. On Monday morning I was at college in Kall and if Kai dropped in at the bakery I was not there to serve him. I was listening to a seemingly interminable talk about food hygiene, but my thoughts were elsewhere. I was wondering whether Kai would come into the bakery and whether he would be looking out for me. Suppose it really happens? I thought. The very idea made me feel slightly light-headed. Will he come in specially to see me, or will he just come in anyway to get his usual order, catch sight of me and suddenly it will hit him?
I could feel my cheeks burning and hoped that I was not blushing. Get a grip, I berated myself silently. It’s not going to happen. The five hundred euros – a real person sent those, whatever their reasons. But nobody can make Kai von Jülich fall in love with me. All the same, I couldn’t resist the temptation to indulge in a few daydreams, ones in which Kai’s face was very close to mine, and I was drinking in the glorious radiance of those golden good looks, basking in the gaze of those heavenly blue eyes.
By Tuesday morning I was in such a state of anticipation that I was distracted. The inevitable happened and two minutes before Kai and his friends came into the bakery I spilt a customer’s coffee all over the floor at the back of the cafe. While I was on my hands and knees like Cinderella, mopping it all up with a cloth and apologizing for the fourth time, Kai had been and gone, served by someone else.
On Tuesday night Achim called in sick, so on Wednesday I worked in the kitchen with my father. Another day at college, on Friday I was in the kitchen again, and then the week was over.
On Friday evening I dragged myself up the stairs to the flat, put the white coat with Magdalena Nett on the front pocket into the wash and shut myself in my room. I felt miserably disappointed and, worse, I felt stupid. I flung myself on the bed and gazed with distaste at the contents of my room – the battered dressing table covered in bottles and jars, the faded duvet cover with a pop star design which had seemed desirable when I was fourteen but now looked ridiculous, the posters tacked up to hide the sentimental-looking floral wallpaper my mother had chosen. I was old enough to vote, old enough to be married – and yet here I was, with no space of my own other than this little girl’s bedroom, no future prospects other than one day receiving my father’s secret recipe for the perfect Florentiner.
I fumbled in my jeans pocket and pulled out the crumpled euro notes which were still stuffed in there, as I had not been able to think of a better hiding place, or a solution to the question of how to pass the money on. If I hadn’t been holding the notes in my hands I would have thought the whole thing was a dream. The delivery of the money was still a mystery, but clearly it was some sort of joke, the work of some all-too-solid person, nothing to do with Rote Gertrud’s house or the witch herself. Well, now the joke was well and truly over. I shoved the cash back into my pocket and lay on the bed, fixing my eyes on the ceiling. Nothing is going to change, I thought, and my heart was heavy. Nothing is going to change.