Join our world of chandlers.

The first candle cracked at half past eight.

Clara noticed it while removing the mould from a fresh batch. A thin fracture ran down the side of the wax, barely visible until she turned it towards the light.

She placed it beside three others that hadn’t turned out quite right.

It was going to be one of those mornings.

The kitchen table had disappeared beneath sheets of labels, tissue paper, cardboard boxes and a collection of small glass jars. Somewhere underneath was a letter from the electricity company that she had been meaning to open.

She had twelve orders to pack before the afternoon collection, two fragrances to test and a supplier who had still not answered her email.

Outside, November rain tapped against the window.

Clara had been making candles for nearly four years. At first, she had worked in the evenings, after coming home from her office job. She remembered the excitement of her first order from someone she didn’t know. She had wrapped the candle three times, worried it might break, and walked to the post office herself.

Now she printed shipping labels in batches.

There were days when she missed that first excitement.

Not because she loved making candles any less. She still enjoyed the moment when a fragrance began to emerge from the warm wax, or when a finished candle stood on the table exactly as she had imagined it.

But there were other things now. Invoices. Rising material costs. Customers asking why a handmade candle cost more than one at the supermarket.

And the quiet calculation she made every month, wondering how much longer she could afford to keep going.

At eleven, she made coffee and opened her emails.

There was a reminder about an unpaid invoice, an advertisement for packaging supplies and a message from a customer whose parcel had arrived damaged.

She answered the last one first.

Then she noticed another email.

The subject line read: I wanted to tell you something.

She almost left it for later.

Instead, she opened it.

Clara sat with her coffee growing cold beside the keyboard.

She read the email again.

Then she looked around the kitchen.

The cracked candles were still on the counter. The invoices hadn’t disappeared. She still had twelve orders to pack, and the supplier still hadn’t replied.

Nothing about her day had changed.

And yet she found herself thinking about the little jar of rosemary and cedarwood.

She remembered making that particular batch. It had been a difficult fragrance to balance. Too much rosemary and it became sharp; too much cedarwood and the freshness disappeared.

She had tested it six times before she was satisfied.

She remembered worrying whether anyone would buy it.

She had never imagined an elderly man in a care home, remembering his greenhouse.

For four years, Clara had thought about what went into her candles.

The wax, the fragrance, the wick. The temperature at which she poured, the time she allowed them to cure, the way she packaged each one so it would arrive safely.

She knew almost everything about a candle until the moment she closed the box.

After that, she knew very little.

She didn’t know which ones were given as birthday presents or which were bought by people who simply wanted something nice for themselves.

She didn’t know whether they sat unopened on shelves, were lit during long winter evenings, or became part of conversations between people who hadn’t seen one another for years.

Perhaps some were never lit at all.

She had always imagined that the end of her work was the moment a parcel left her hands.

Now she wasn’t so sure.

Clara began writing a reply.

She thanked the woman for taking the time to tell her. She said she was glad the fragrance had reminded her father of his garden.

She wrote another sentence, deleted it, then decided the two she had written were enough.

Before returning to work, she opened the notebook where she recorded her fragrance formulas.

Beside Rosemary & Cedarwood, underneath the measurements and testing notes, she wrote:

The greenhouse.

She didn’t know why she wanted to remember it.

Perhaps because, for the first time in weeks, the numbers on the page seemed to describe something more than a product.

By late afternoon, the rain had stopped.

Clara finished packing the last order, carried the boxes to the front door and waited for the courier.

One parcel was going to a woman in Bristol. Another to a small village she had never heard of. Three were marked as gifts.

She lifted the final box from the table.

Inside was a candle she had poured the previous Tuesday. She had checked the wick, polished the glass and wrapped it carefully in tissue paper.

There was nothing unusual about it.

She placed it beside the others.

In a few days, someone would open that box.

Clara would probably never know what happened next.

And for once, she found that thought rather wonderful.