🫢thank you for everything
I'm sitting in my car staring at the shopfront with «Claire's» on the window and I can't stop crying 😭 I look like an absolute state — puffy eyes, red nose, mascara everywhere. I don't even care. I'm looking through the windshield at THIS and I can't believe it's real. That it's MINE. My name's Claire Henderson. I'm 27. And today I opened my own bakery. Mine. The one I've dreamt about for so many years that I'd completely stopped believing it would ever actually happen. My nan Ruth had a wee bakery on the corner when I was a kid. Smallest one on the street, but it smelt so good people would cross the road just to breathe it in. Cinnamon scrolls, sourdough bread, lemon tarts — everything by hand, every single day from 4 a.m. I'd come home from school, plonk myself on the wooden stool by the oven and watch her work. She'd give me dough — knead it, shape it, make wonky little buns that the whole family ate anyway. When I was 10, Nan closed the bakery. Rent got too steep. I remember her standing in the doorway with the keys in her hand, staring at the empty space. She didn't say a word. Just stood there, turned around, and walked away. That night she put her recipe book on my bed — thick, flour-dusted, yellowed pages. On the first page, in her handwriting: "For Claire. When the time comes." I was 10. I hugged that book to my chest and promised myself that one day I'd have my own bakery. That I'd bring back everything Nan lost. I trained as a pastry chef. Worked in other people's bakeries, other people's cafés. Three years saving every last dollar. Almost $25,000 saved. Found the perfect wee space, paid the bond and first months, started the fitout. Then the building owner sold to a developer. Kicked out in two weeks. Fitout, bond, rent — everything gone. Lawyers said: "Could take a year or two to recover anything." In three months I lost everything I'd saved in three years. Back to working in someone else's bakery. Every morning at 4 a.m. Nan's recipe book gath
