Content Warning: This section of the guide discusses antisemitism and the Holocaust.

It is September in Cape Cod. A woman named Hope is doing the morning baking in her family’s bakery, the North Star, which her grandmother, Mamie, began 60 years ago. Hope contemplates her prospects. She feels like a failure after her divorce. She’s moved back into her mother’s home. Her 12-year-old daughter, Annie, is upset about the divorce. Hope’s mother is dead; her grandmother, Mamie, has AD; and Hope is left to run the bakery, though she wanted more for her life.

Matt, her old high school boyfriend, stops in. He’s asked her out before, but Hope isn’t ready to date. “Life changes you, even if you don’t realize it while it’s happening, and it turns out you can’t take back the years that have passed by” (3), Hope thinks. Once again, Matt asks Hope out to dinner, and this time she accepts. Annie is rude to him when she arrives at the bakery. Hope wishes that she could connect with her daughter, thinking, “[s]he’s still in there somewhere, but she’s hiding behind this icy veneer” (7). Annie wants to go to school wearing makeup and says that her dad gave her permission.