Chapter One
Ava
Present Day
I wouldn’t exactly call myself a clock watcher, but I couldn’t afford not to keep track of time. If I wasn’t at my bakery by five, then I wouldn’t have any breakfast pastries available when my regulars arrived at six-thirty on their way to an early work day. If I didn’t set timers throughout the day, I’d forget to put the bread into the oven. I’d get so busy at the counter chatting with Mrs. Beatty that I’d forget to pull cookies, muffins, or cakes out.
My entire day was a string of alarms—playing snippets of U2, of course—until eight o’clock, when I fell into an exhausted pile on my bed and waited for the next one.
But I wouldn’t have it any other way. I busted my butt to save enough money working as a sous chef at a restaurant forty minutes away—the closest one I could find to Cedar Springs that was hiring at the time—to buy and renovate this place, even with a small business loan. It took years of chasing that dream, and I wouldn’t waste a single moment of it.
Especially since this was only my first dream, just the beginning of my grand plan. Today, I would start work on the second.
I unlocked the door to The Rolling Scone—yes, it was cheesy, but it reminded me of my dad and his rock albums—and took a deep breath and a long look at the place that felt like a second home. A tidy counter of white granite sat atop a base of dark and light wood that formed pinstripes across the front, greeting customers right as they entered. My display cases housed black and white platters of all the goodies I baked. Warm, rich wood tones filled the entire bakery and its incorporated cafe space, with a splash of cotton candy pink or teal to keep it lively. I’d even thrown in a houseplant or two, but only the ones that could take some abuse because no matter my best intentions, I seemed incapable of keeping a watering schedule. Flipping on the vintage copper dome lights, I smiled and headed behind the counter into the kitchen.
Those breakfast muffins wouldn’t bake themselves.
It was just past one in the afternoon when Mrs. Beatty made her daily visit to The Rolling Scone. I heard her coming a block away when she loudly asked Aiden Llywelyn how his grandmother was doing.
Setting down the fresh pot of coffee I’d just started filling, I hurried to the door and held it open as she pushed her walker down the last stretch of sidewalk between us. Every single day since I opened the place, Mrs. Beatty made the two-mile walk from Cedar Lake into town to buy a cupcake. She could drive. I’d offered to drive her, or to simply deliver her cupcakes as part of her next-door-neighbor privileges, but she refused every time.
“Getting your steps in early today, I see,” I commented as she made her slow progress into the bakery.
“I know you’ve got big plans tonight,” she replied, letting go of the walker and pulling a ten dollar bill out of her wallet. “I’ll try that one today.” She pointed with pure mischief at my Sprinkle Explosion cupcake—an outrageous mess of pink frosting, glitter, and every type of sprinkle I could find. The kids loved it and, if I was honest, so did I.
“That’s this weekend,” I chuckled, plating the cupcake and carrying it over to her table, the one she sat at every afternoon. She discovered through a prior interrogation that my only birthday plans consisted of hoping that my friends would visit me in a few days. I wasn’t holding my breath, but I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t getting excited about the prospect of seeing them.
We’d tried several years running to get a group weekend trip set up, but inevitably someone would need to pull out of it. We did our best to keep a group text going where we updated each other on big things, especially when we weren’t able to celebrate them together. More often than I liked, that had been the case, but I supposed that came with the territory of growing up.
She followed me, leaving the ten on the counter and taking her seat with a grimace. I put my arm out in case she needed it, even though I knew she wouldn’t take it unless she was about to hit the ground. Once she was good and settled and digging into her sugary confection, I made change for her ten and brought it to the table—another of our little rituals.
The glare she leveled at me when the change hit the smooth oak tabletop would’ve made a stranger flee. “You know I don’t want that,” she shot.
“You know that cupcake only costs four dollars,” I riposted, fighting a smile at the comfort of habit.
“Give me more sprinkles and we’ll call it even.”
I couldn’t stop the grin that escaped as I collected the change and headed back for sprinkles. I kept her special jar of pink and white sprinkles below the cash register.
“Does your son know that you walk down a state road with your walker every single day? Twice?” I asked.
“If he ever deigns to come back here, he’ll find out for himself.”
Giving the sprinkle jar a good shake over her plate, I caught her deep brown eyes. “You know, if you ever decide that you don’t want to—”
“Don’t you dare finish that sentence Ava Lancaster, or I’ll start leaving you twenties.”
Leave it to Mrs. Beatty to guilt me into silence. I already felt like I was stealing from her with the generous tips she insisted on giving me.
“Fine, fine.” I raised my hands between us, palms out. “You know I had to try, or Travis would kill me when he finds out what you’re up to.”
My alarm went off, prompting my hasty retreat into the kitchen.
“Sourdough?” Mrs. Beatty called.
“Rye,” I corrected her.
“Someone’s feeling spicy today,” she chuckled as I disappeared through the back door, and I couldn’t help but smile once more.
I’d never been able to decide if Mrs. Beatty’s trips were for me or for her, though I supposed they could be a bit of both. When my parents died in a car accident my senior year of college—on their way to visit me, no less—I inherited the lake house and the watchful eyes of Mr. and Mrs. Beatty.
The summer after I graduated, Mr. Beatty would come knocking every time he smelled me baking, and I always made extra to satisfy his sweet tooth. Five years ago, just as I was beginning renovations on The Rolling Scone, we lost him to colon cancer.
Part of me wondered if Mrs. Beatty insisted on walking so that she had fewer hours alone in her house, so that as much of her day as possible was occupied by her excursions. Part of me wondered if she still felt obligated to check in on me since my parents couldn’t. Either way, I appreciated her, and I tried to return the favor of her company as often as possible.
When I came back from the kitchen carrying two loaves of fresh rye bread, Mrs. Beatty began today’s interrogation without even looking up from her giant cupcake.
“Are all the girls coming back in town for the big day?”
I shrugged, trying to play it cool so she didn’t realize I’d been wondering that same thing since four in the morning. Yesterday.
“I invited them all, but you know how busy they are.”
She did look at me then, with profound disapproval over the top of her soft pink glasses. “If they can’t make it to your thirtieth birthday, dear, you need new friends.”
“Don’t hold back,” I teased, “tell me what you really think.” Her words dredged up a feeling in my gut that I’d long kept at bay, one that terrified me so much I refused to give it a thought, let alone a voice.
“I’m perfectly serious, Ava.” The lightness of her tone belied the depth of her words. “You deserve friends who show up for you. And I know precious few of them were here when your parents passed, or when you graduated, or when you opened this place.”
“They travel a lot,” I offered, focusing on drizzling lemon glaze on the next batch of scones instead of the way her words made me feel. “And Riley came for the opening. We all have trouble making in-person gatherings work, but we still text all the time.”
She wasn’t wrong, but she also wasn’t exactly right. Yes, I’d be thrilled to see them all the time and have girls’ nights like we used to do. But I’d known this would happen even way back in high school—we all had. The handful of times we’d managed to meet up—a few holidays, Viv’s wedding—we fell back into our friendship like no time had passed. Even if they couldn’t be here in person, every single one of us would tell you the others were our best friends.
“You need friends for who you are now, not who you were in high school. I know Marta’s girl, Iris, still lives in town. And the younger Zamorska kids do, too. You could get together and form your own raid crew.”
“I haven’t played in the raids since my girls left.” I couldn’t imagine manning a ship without them. “And anyway, I work all the weekends now and crash before sunset. We’d never be able to coordinate it.”
“Never say never.”
The summer raids were a decades-old tradition at the lakes, begun by one of the old history teachers at the high school and a football coach, sometime before my parents attended. Cedar Lake was the largest of four interconnected lakes. Every summer, each of the four lakes formed its own team to compete in a friendly season-long game of capture the flag. Except the flag was a giant replica of a medieval battle standard and was only capturable by water.
This inevitably led to a great many summer nights of my neighbors and classmates decking their pontoons out like Viking longships and night boating to the next lake over to steal back the standard. Back and forth, with both daytime and nighttime raids, we would duke it out, amassing points and often engaging in squirt gun battles. On Labor Day weekend, the team with the most points hosted a block party and kept the standard until the following Memorial Day, when the battle began again.
My girls and I loved the raids. Any excuse to take the boat out, right? One weekend, the summer after our sophomore year, we even dressed up like Vikings for one of our raids.
But once we left for college, our numbers dwindled quickly. At first Jules was the only one who couldn’t make it. Then Viv. Riley and Gianna lasted until the summer following our junior year of college—the last one I shared with them or my parents.
Gianna may have been a workaholic who wanted to put as much distance between herself and Cedar Springs as possible, but that girl had a mean competitive streak. It was what always pushed her to excel in school, to crush law school at Harvard, to pass her bar, and to follow her dreams. But it was also why she was legendary around here when people talked about the summer raids. It just wouldn’t be the same playing in them without her.
And, despite what Mrs. Beatty might believe, I had tried making new friends. Some very nice people had come into my life at various points, and I’d fostered those new friendships to the best of my ability.
But, at the end of the day, I never found anybody quite like my girls.