Chapter Twelve
C an we talk about your feud with Magda? How did it start?”
Julia’s tone was mild and inquiring, but Mac felt that internal screw tightening, the way it always did when someone asked that question. He hated that question. But he disguised the tightness with a lazy, unbothered smile. “Oh, you know how it is. She’s a dog person; I’m a cat person. We were doomed from the start.”
If Julia was annoyed by his evasion, it didn’t show as she studied him with a slight smile, her stylus tapping idly against her ever-present tablet. “All right. What’s your cat’s name?”
Mac blinked, thrown by her easy acceptance. Wasn’t she supposed to dig into all his emotional baggage? Wasn’t that what these confessional sessions were for? In addition to recapping exactly what he’d felt at every single moment of the last bake, of course.
But they’d already done that bit.
It was day four—or week three, as the producers kept reminding him to call it when he was being interviewed, since this would be the third episode. After the marathon croissant challenge on Tuesday when Magda had sabotaged him, Mac had barely survived the Elimination Challenge yesterday with his chip-a-tooth éclairs—though one of the older gents from Florida hadn’t been as lucky. Roy had gone home with admirable dignity—which was really all Mac had to say about him since he’d barely met the man.
Today was a light day. There’d been only the one bake—a Skills Challenge making some crazy German cake called baumkuchen, which Mac would definitely have flubbed if he hadn’t been at a station behind Magda’s. He’d shamelessly copied her—and managed to come out solidly in the middle of the pack.
The winners and losers of the third episode would be chosen after tomorrow’s Mystery Challenge—which meant more time for interviews today. Lucky him.
“You really want to know my cat’s name?” he challenged. “That’s what the home viewer is dying to know about me?”
Julia shrugged. “You never know what’s going to be useful in the edit.”
It was a perfectly reasonable answer, but it bugged him and he shifted in the uncomfortable director’s chair. “It’s all about getting that soundbite, huh?”
“Sometimes,” she admitted. “Sometimes a question is just about starting a conversation. Putting a subject at ease with a comfortable topic. Though that hasn’t really been a problem with you. You’ve been comfortable in front of the cameras since day one. Very sure of who you are.”
“Don’t know how to be anyone else.”
Julia nodded with a slight smile. “Makes my job easier.”
“Oh yeah? How’s that?”
“It’s my job to introduce you to America. To make them fall in love with you and root for you—or against you, if they fall in love with Magda first. You’d be amazed how much of that depends on the edit. What we keep in, what we leave out. The audience loves conflict—but also honesty. Emotional truth. Vulnerability. The best way to win them over is to be real. So if you’re sitting here bullshitting me about your feud, there’s no point pursuing that. At least if you’re talking about your cat, you’re being real.”
He could do vulnerable. He was emotionally evolved. He’d been to therapy. Though he’d never talked about Magda with his therapist. And opening up about their past just felt wrong somehow. Especially on camera.
He folded his arms. “You’re so sure it was bullshit?”
“Did her dog eat your cat?”
“No.” He was pretty sure Cupcake didn’t realize she was bigger than the tabby. “She’s scared of him.”
“Then I somehow doubt Magda being a dog person is the origin of your feud. Unless you hate all dogs.”
He lifted both hands in surrender. “Hey, I don’t hate dogs. I’m not a monster.”
Julia nodded. “But you’re a cat person. Why’s that?”
All of a sudden it felt like a weirdly personal question. “I don’t know. Cats are… independent. They know who they are. My cat lives his life, and I live mine. Dogs are needy. Desperate.”
“And you don’t like needy.”
“Needy is too much responsibility.”
Julia’s eyebrows arched. “And yet you own your own business. That’s a lot of responsibility.”
He shrugged. “That’s different.”
“How so?”
“I don’t know. I just sort of fell into it.” The Cup had always felt more like an evolution than a choice. He’d opened it when he’d moved home after his grandfather got sick and then the rest had just sort of… happened. Like most of his life. Mac searched his thoughts, trying to put into words something that always felt so self-evident he’d never needed to explain it. “I’m not letting anyone else down. If I succeed or fail, it’s all on me. And that’s how I like it.”
“Is that why you’re single?”
“What?” That had come out of left field. “Of course not.” Shit. Was it? “No.”
Julia’s question had been casual, not at all confrontational, but he still felt defensive as she clarified, “But you don’t like being needed.”
“I—” He broke off, frowning. “I didn’t mean it like that. I’m not an asshole. I’m there for my friends. For my family. I have good relationships.” But it was always on his terms. And he heard the defensive note in his voice.
“Didn’t mean to imply otherwise,” Julia assured him. “So, what’s this cat’s name?”
“I just call him Cat.”
Julia smiled suddenly. “You have a cat named Cat.”
“Far as I know. He didn’t tell me otherwise.”
“Like Breakfast at Tiffany’s ?”
He shrugged. “It’s a good movie. But it wasn’t because of Audrey Hepburn or anything. He just wandered in one day and made himself at home. I started calling him that, and it stuck.”
Julia nodded. “So you’re a cat person—aloof, craves independence—and Magda is a dog person—needy, craves connection—”
His vague sense of unease suddenly sharpened. “I didn’t say that. I never said she was needy.”
“Is she?”
The question was innocuous. Mild. And Mac glowered. “I’m not going to talk shit about her. You’re never going to get that soundbite.”
This feud between them… it was complicated. But he wasn’t going to let anyone insult Magda.
If Julia was taken aback by his vehemence, it didn’t show. “Right.” She studied him, her head cocked, a slight smile on her face. As if she saw more than he wanted her to see.
“She’s a great baker,” Mac said firmly. “A great person. We’re just oil and water. We don’t mix. We never have.”
Julia’s eyebrows slid upward skeptically. “Never?”
That single word was so heavily loaded, Mac felt that screw in his chest twisting uncomfortably tight again. “Why? What did she tell you?”
“Let’s talk about you and Mac.”
Magda groaned. “Do we have to? I’m trying my hardest to pretend he isn’t here.”
He’d survived yesterday—so she told herself she didn’t have to feel guilty anymore. It had been a near thing—his éclairs had been overcooked to granite hardness, and he’d landed in the bottom three, but a complete disaster from Roy had saved him.
Today, Mac had been behind her, so it had been easy to pretend he wasn’t there—she could even convince herself she couldn’t hear his voice, charming the camera with his self-deprecating mispronunciation of baumkuchen. She’d put her head down, let her old habits take over, and her baumkuchen had been beautiful.
It had been a good bake, and she’d very easily avoided Mac when they broke for lunch while the crew took glamour shots of their baumkuchen all lined up in a row.
She could have apologized to him then. If she’d really wanted to, there had been plenty of chances, but her apologies so often turned into new fights that she’d decided avoidance was the better part of valor.
Avoid and ignore, that was her new motto.
After lunch, the judging had been meticulous, but the judges had raved about the “obvious technique” evident in her cake and she’d landed in the top two—second only to Tim, who had barely edged her out. Mac had actually placed fourth, between Abby and Leah—which had shocked her because she didn’t think he’d ever made the challenging German cake before.
Then it was interview time, and she’d hoped they could just talk about the good run she was on, about finding her stride, but Julia had hit her with a different question as soon as she sat down. It was always about Mac.
“Is that why you sabotaged him?” Julia asked, the question surprisingly gentle.
Magda really wished they could stop talking about that. “I’m not proud of that.”
Julia cocked her head—a gesture Magda was coming to recognize as her tell me more encouragement. “Then why did you pick him? Really.”
They’d already been over this, and Julia hadn’t asked her to rephrase her answer in a camera friendly I’m not proud of sabotaging Mac during the second challenge , so there was an illusion that they were just talking. An illusion she had no intention of being drawn in by. “He’s a great baker. Maybe I was just going after my biggest competition.”
“He hasn’t come in first,” Julia pointed out.
“Wait until we get to breads.”
“You could have gone after Leah. Or Abby. They’ve both been steadily in the top.”
Magda scoffed. “I’m not going to go after my friends.” She knew she was supposed to be mercenary and “not there to make friends,” but she liked the red team.
“So Mac isn’t a friend.”
No. Mac was a lot of things. But a friend definitely wasn’t one of them.
“What’s the feud about, Magda?” Julia pressed. “We had our researchers dig into it, asking around Pine Hollow, and they couldn’t find a thing. Just that you two have been at each other’s throats for over a decade, and no one knows why. It’s impressive, actually. I’d almost think it was fake—I’m pretty sure a couple of our rivals have exaggerated their animosity for the show, but not you two. So what is it? Love gone sour? Family thing? Business dispute?”
All of the above.
But Magda didn’t admit that out loud. “What’s he told you?”
Julia smiled. “No more than you have. Yet. But one of you is going to get to control the narrative. Don’t you want it to be you?”
“Any luck?”
Julia collapsed onto the couch beside Greg, groaning. A bunch of the producers were all housed in a rental property a short walk from the inn, and Greg had been calmly reviewing footage on his tablet, flagging the most promising snippets to be used in the preliminary edit, when Julia flung herself down next to him.
“Total fail,” she said morosely.
The interviews today had been less than fruitful—and then she’d had the delight of being chewed out personally by Stephen because her pairs weren’t talking to her. She’d been informed—in no uncertain terms—that her job was to make them talk and someone else could certainly do her job if she couldn’t. She’d already pushed them more than she normally would today, saying things to see if she could get a reaction, which was never her style. And even that hadn’t worked.
“Magda implied it was about a recipe. Mac said she snagged a prime location on the town square that she knew he’d had his eye on. There’s obviously more there, but neither of them is talking.”
“I almost envy you. I can’t get Tim and Leah to stop talking about all their grievances. I can barely get them to talk about the bakes.”
“Any advice?” This wasn’t her wheelhouse. Being encouraging and coaxing out their honest reactions about their bakes was her thing.
Greg shrugged. “Keep at it. Be patient. Be their friend.”
“How am I supposed to get Magda to open up to me when we broke her trust by lying to her on day one? And Mac—he seems like he’s this easygoing I’ll-tell-anyone-anything kind of guy, but then the second you mention her he clams up.”
“Definitely something there.”
“I know ,” Julia snapped. And she was sure she could have gotten them to talk about it with time, but with Stephen threatening her job, she felt like she was being bullied into pushing them too fast. Which was only making them defensive. “I don’t think I’m going to get there with trust, so I made it about control. I told both of them that someone is going to get to control the narrative and they should want it to be them, but that only got me the he-stole-my-recipe, she-stole-my-spot stuff. Neither of them wants to be vulnerable in front of me or tell me anything real.”
“Or it might not be you,” Greg suggested. “It might be the cameras. The home viewer. All their friends and family. Have you tried off camera? Just talking to them?”
Julia shook her head. “Not about the feud. Stephen would murder me if they started opening up and I didn’t have it on film.”
Greg shrugged. “Maybe see if you can get them talking when it’s not in the confessionals. Or better yet—put them in a room together when they think they aren’t being filmed.”
Julia didn’t move, but she felt her insides shifting away from Greg at the words. “Isn’t that sort of dishonest?” And morally gross…
“They signed the contracts.”
“Yeah, but… I don’t want to trick them.”
“It’s not a trick. It’s just part of the job.”
“Yeah, but Cake-Off is fluffy. It’s as sweet as the treats they make. It’s not supposed to be about digging into people’s pasts and making them talk about things they don’t want to talk about.” It was why she’d wanted this job. This show. Because it was lovely and positive. A force for good in the world of reality television—where those things could be very hit or miss.
“That was before. Stephen’s Cake-Off is about drama. And if you won’t get it, someone else will.”
“Right,” Julia whispered, something inside her deflating.
“We have those promo shoots tomorrow,” Greg said, referencing the photo shoot that would take up the morning before the Elimination Challenge.
The publicity team had declared the cast photos from day one virtually unusable. Shockingly, taking photos of the bakers when they were traumatized by their first bake hadn’t been as good as their hopeful eager smiles beforehand typically were. The publicity team was getting ready to do a big press release announcing the show’s new twist, and they wanted shots of pairs of rivals glaring at each other over mixers and threatening each other with whisks.
“You could have a PA wandering around getting behind-the-scenes footage and see if you can get them to talk,” Greg suggested.
“Yeah, I guess,” Julia mumbled. It was a good idea, but she didn’t feel good about it.
She’d always loved her job before this season. She’d felt good about what they were making and what she was doing to make it happen. Yes, there were times when people fell apart, when an ice cream cake melted or a soufflé collapsed, but when the contestants broke down, it wasn’t because the producers were trying to drive them to the brink. It was just because they cared so much, because this experience meant so much to them, and it was stressful to bake to a timer on national television. The show didn’t need all this. It hadn’t been failing—and yet here they were, being told to fix something that wasn’t broken, and cross their contestants’ emotional boundaries to do it.
And the difference showed on the bakers’ faces.
Magda, in particular, seemed different. More guarded than she had been before the rivals arrived. Not that she’d ever been as open or comfortable as Mac. She’d always been reserved, a little shy and awkward in all of her early audition tapes. Julia had figured Magda would need a little coaching to bring her out of her shell, but she’d always been so sweet and smiling.
Now she just looked miserable. Which made Julia feel like absolute garbage.
Everyone was tense now. Defensive. And Julia was caught between needing to keep her job so she could at least attempt to protect her bakers and needing to get her bakers to talk about things they clearly didn’t want to talk about in order to keep that job.
She didn’t know what to do. But tomorrow was the photo shoot. She’d have Mac and Magda in a room together. Maybe a miracle would occur.