Curtis sat there with the engine running while I pulled up the app on my phone. The camera had caught everything, clear as day. Twelve bags coming off the truck. Twelve. And at the bottom of the screen, the delivery slip he had just handed me, signed for twenty.
Then I scrolled back. April. May. June. Every single delivery since I put that camera up. Every one of them short. Four bags. Six bags. Once, nine.
He turned off the engine.
The barista from next door, Lena, leaned her broom against the wall and walked over. She said her coffee deliveries from the same company had been short too. She thought it was her mistake. She had stopped counting.
Six months of being the woman who miscounts, and a forty dollar camera over my back door had been keeping perfect count the whole time.
Curtis said it was a warehouse error. I asked him how the warehouse knew to short only the shops on his route. He did not have an answer. He drove off without the rest of my signature.
I sent the footage to the distributor that afternoon. The regional manager, a man named Doug, called me back within the hour. He said he had gotten three other complaints about that route since summer and had written them off. He said he would not be writing this one off.
It took them two weeks. Curtis had been shorting deliveries and selling the extra bags for cash to a restaurant supply store across town. The company fired him and credited every shop on his route for every bag, going back to April. My credit came to eleven hundred dollars.
But I still had a wedding cake due Saturday, and I was eight bags short that morning.
Lena solved it. She said her cafe kept extra flour for pastries, more than she would ever use. She carried six bags over herself that afternoon. The baker from the donut shop on the corner, who I had only ever waved at, brought two more. He had heard the story from Lena. He would not let me pay him.
I baked all night. Four tiers. Lemon and raspberry. I finished the last sugar flower at 5:40 in the morning.
The bride cried when she saw it. So did her mother. She sent me a photo from the reception, the whole cake lit up under string lights. I taped it to the register.
The new delivery driver is a woman named Pat. She counts every bag out loud as she unloads it, and makes me count with her. She says it is a habit from her last job. I think Doug told her to.
Every Friday now, I bring Lena a box of whatever did not sell. She brings me coffee. The donut man stops by on Sundays for a slice of lemon loaf.
I still have the camera. It still counts every bag. It has not found a missing one since.