Tempered Moments: A Story and a Play, Tethered by Poems

At Bellamy's, a third-generation candy shop, precision is a kind of faith. The Candymaker has built his life around temperature, timing, and the belief that work done correctly should speak for itself. When a young employee arrives in the spring of 1997, her eagerness, warmth, and growing influence unsettle the order he has spent years creating.

What begins as instruction becomes intimacy. What he experiences as devotion, she may understand as something more temporary. As the seasons change and the shop shifts around them, craft, desire, jealousy, and memory become inseparable. Years later, the Candymaker still tells the story with absolute confidence, even as his own words expose the distance between what happened and what he needs to believe.

Tempered Moments presents this charged history twice. "The Candymaker," a short story, offers one man's carefully controlled account. TEMPER, a one-act play, reopens the same year through bodies, dialogue, silence, and competing points of view. Poems placed before, between, and after the two works deepen the book's exploration of longing, interpretation, and the unstable afterlife of a single moment.

A story, a play, and poems become one literary composition about perfection, power, desire, and the stories people create when the past refuses to remain settled.