Chapter 17
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
“At what point do I need to call the EMTs?”
Andrea looked up from her laptop screen, blinking blearily at Phantom, who was perched on the kitchen counter surveying the chaos around her with obvious concern.
“What? Why?” she asked, her voice hoarse from hours of dictating recipe instructions.
“By my calculations, you’ve consumed enough caffeine to stop an elephant’s heart, you haven’t moved from that chair in the last four hours, and you’ve stopped blinking altogether,” Phantom replied dryly.
Andrea glanced around the kitchen, taking in the scene through fresh eyes.
Empty coffee mugs dotted every available surface, test batches of cupcakes in various stages of completion covered the counters, and her laptop was surrounded by handwritten notes, printed pages, and sticky notes covered in her increasingly illegible scrawl.
“I’m fine,” she said, though she had to admit her hands were slightly shaky from the caffeine. “I’m just on a roll. I finished the last recipe this morning, and now all I need to do is finish the write-up. I’m officially in the home stretch, and don’t want to lose my momentum.”
She turned back to her laptop and hit send on the email she’d been composing.
“A trip to the ER for sudden cardiac arrest would put a damper on things,” Phantom said with a flourish of his tail. “But the truth is, I don’t have opposable thumbs, so I couldn’t call the paramedics even if you did need them.”
Andrea snorted a laugh and scrolled down on the screen to begin proofreading the next recipe in the deck of virtual cards she’d created. “Then why did you offer?”
“It was more of a wake-up call, really,” Phantom replied, tipping his nose up toward the ceiling in an indignant posture.
“It was also an opening to get you to pay attention to me. You’ve undoubtedly been too busy to notice, but the lunch hour has come and gone, and yet nary a solitary flake of tuna has hit my bowl. ”
“Yeah, yeah,” Andrea mumbled, her eyes skimming over the list of ingredients, cross-referencing it to the carefully written notes in the notebook beside her.
It was one of her older recipes, created some time in the summer months before her creativity had dried up and turned drier than Death Valley.
It wasn’t going to win her any awards or be featured in any food magazines, but it was a solid recipe, and—more importantly at this stage of the game—it filled a slot.
When she was satisfied she’d aligned everything according to her final recipe test, she scrolled to the next recipe but stopped short of diving in, instead giving herself and her back a break as she indulged Phantom’s not-so-subtle request for a meal.
Come to think of it, when was the last time she had eaten anything?
A few lonely sugar cookies sat on a plate near the microwave—they were two days old now and the frosting would be dry.
Glancing at them on her way to the pantry only managed to dredge up thoughts of Wes.
In the end, Emma’s sleepover plans had gone awry after one of the girls had a bout of either food poisoning or flu, leading everyone to go home into quarantine until it could be determined one way or the other.
Wes had offered to come over anyway, but she’d let him off the hook and told him it worked out for the best, as it gave her time to work.
In reality, it was less about making her deadline, and more about putting off the inevitable relationship conversation a little while longer. But she knew that as soon as she hit submit on the email to Martina, she’d have to face the future.
She sorted through her options for the dozenth time as she made herself a grilled cheese sandwich and fed Phantom.
When the sandwich was toasted to perfection, she dished it up and settled herself back at her laptop, careful to keep her buttery fingers from leaving grease marks on the laptop’s trackpad as she continued working.
Phantom watched her for a little while longer, though he was mercifully silent as he cleaned his face and whiskers.
Then, apparently bored, he set off to the living room, leaving her and Crumpet alone in the kitchen.
Crumpet waited for Phantom to vanish, then scrabbled across the kitchen to lick out the cat’s empty bowl.
Andrea rolled her eyes but didn’t scold him.
When he finished, he trotted back to the faded braided loop mat by the back door, circled three times, and flopped to the ground with a contented exhale.
“That was dramatic,” Andrea commented, glancing over the top of her screen. The dog looked at her, slivers of white showing under his velvet-soft brown eyes. “I know, I know. I promise we’ll go for a W-A-L-K as soon as I’m done.”
At the thought, she glanced out the window over the kitchen sink. There were still a few hours of daylight left, cold and overcast as they were, and another mental countdown clock started ticking in the back of her mind.
Finish the cookbook
Walk the dog
Figure out what to do with the rest of my life
Simple!
She gave a frustrated shake of her head and forced herself to focus on the laptop, banishing all other thoughts.
Two hours later, she scanned over the last recipe—a cherries jubilee recipe, somewhat inspired by Emma’s suggestion to make a Shirley Temple in cupcake form.
It was another filler recipe, and Andrea knew it, but she had wanted to do something with cherries, and she knew it would photograph well.
All in all, it was shaping up to be a rather boozy collection of cupcakes, but she didn’t think anyone would mind.
Least of all Martina, whose parents owned a vineyard in Napa.
She could probably smooth some of her editor’s ruffled feathers by offering to include a feature on the vineyard’s dessert wines.
In theory, this wouldn’t be her last cookbook, so it would be best to keep Martina on her side.
A shoutout to the family business and a glowing acknowledgment in the back of the book ought to patch things up nicely.
Regardless, this would be her last cookbook about cupcakes.
She was over it. What was it Wes had said in one of their earliest meetings?
How many types of cupcakes can there be?
She would never know the answer, of course, but she would no longer be on a quest to make new discoveries. At least, not any time soon.
She smiled at the memory, though it faded quickly as she started to think about a fourth cookbook and what it would mean.
She was already struggling to keep up with everything.
As promised, Paige had sent screenshots of the latest sales, but there were still quite a few large cancellations and an overall slump reflected in the data.
The pop-up had moved on, according to Lainey’s morning report, but somehow that hadn’t cheered Andrea up or dulled her anxiety.
“Ugh!” she groaned to herself, shaking her head, her short blonde tresses flying around her face.
Frustrated, she raked them back with more force than was needed and was in the process of pinning the messiest of all messy buns to the back of her head when her phone rang.
It was Lainey, and Andrea let her hair fall back down as she reached for the phone, desperate for a friendly voice.
“So, how are the plans coming along for your maple farm?” Lainey asked after they exchanged greetings. “You know, I’ve been thinking—I’ve got quite a few spells that work well for saplings, if you’re looking to establish some new trees,” Lainey teased.
Andrea made sure her files were saved and closed the lid of the laptop. Martina was based in LA, so technically there was half a day before she would be leaving the office and officially dubbing the deadline blown.
With a sigh, Andrea leaned back in her chair, her neck and shoulders finally raising their protests to a volume loud enough for her to hear, and she winced, realizing just how much of the last forty-eight hours she’d spent hunched over.
She didn’t know what she would do when she got back to Hecate’s Kitchen, but one of her first orders of business needed to involve a masseuse and a deep tissue massage.
“No saplings just yet,” Andrea replied, beginning to roll her shoulders and stretch her neck from side to side. “But I am actually about to finish the cookbook!”
“You are?!” Lainey held the phone away and whooped loudly enough to convey her celebratory tone, but not so loud that she burst Andrea’s eardrum. “I wish I was there to crack open the champagne with you! Tell me you’re doing something fun to celebrate? Or someone … should I say?”
Andrea giggled. “You’re terrible, you know that, right?”
“Come on, Andi, you know I mainly called you to ask about the hot contractor.”
Andrea smiled up at the ceiling. “Well, to be honest, things have gotten a little more … complicated.”
“He doesn’t support your maple tree farm dreams?” Lainey deadpanned.
Andrea laughed. “Be serious! It’s not about that. I think Wes would be the kind to support me if I came home one day and told him I was opening a rescue sanctuary for abandoned baby unicorns.”
“At least picking up their poop would be pretty.”
Andrea rolled her eyes, still smiling.
She quickly caught Lainey up on the latest events, including the near disaster at the baking day and the unexpected revelation that Wes was in fact more acquainted with the magic world of witches than anyone could have previously imagined.
Lainey, who was far more spiritually inclined than Andrea, quickly latched on to a new theory.
“It’s kismet, Andi! Tell me you see that?
His daughter is a witch? I mean, what are the odds of that? ”