Chapter 5
HALLIE
The cake arrived on the morning boat, and I knew from the dock.
You can read a crate the way you can read a face.
This one had been strapped upright, which was right, and stacked under something, which was criminal, and it came down the gangway on a hand truck at an angle that made my whole spine go tight.
Lauren was signing for it with the happy efficiency of a woman crossing off item forty-one of two hundred, and the ferry deckhand was saying something about a swell out past the point, and I stood there on the dock in my sundress doing dessert triage through half an inch of plywood, because that is a skill I have and this was its moment.
"Should we open it?" Lauren said. "Let's open it at the kitchen. Why would we open it here. Should we open it here?"
"Let's open it here," I said, gently, the way you tell someone to sit down before news.
Curro brought a pry bar. The side came off, and the smell came out first, butter gone warm and re-chilled, sugar with a history, and then we all looked at what four days of mainland logistics, one refrigerated van, a cargo hold, and a swell past the point had done to three tiers of Lauren's dream in Italian meringue.
The top tier had left its moorings and gone exploring.
It had come to rest against the crate wall the way a drunk rests against a fence: technically upright, fundamentally changed.
The middle tier wore the top tier's original location as a crater.
The buttercream had melted somewhere off the coast and re-set into a texture I can only call geological.
Sugar peonies, forty of them, hand-made, lay drifted at the bottom like the aftermath of a small civic disaster.
Nobody said anything. Then Lauren made a sound, small, one syllable, the sound of a laminated schedule meeting the sea, and my mother put a hand over her mouth, and Theo said a word that isn't in wedding programs.
"Okay," I said. "Okay. Nobody panic. This is fixable."
"It's dead," Lauren whispered.
"It's very dead," I agreed. "This specific cake is beyond all medicine. I'm going to build you a new one."
And here's the thing, the part I'd have found funny in a movie: they'd ordered this cake, mainland, vetted twice, tasted three times, for one reason.
So that I could come to my brother's wedding as a sister instead of a vendor.
Lauren had said it to me at the engagement dinner with her whole earnest heart: you're not working this wedding, Hallie, you're IN it.
They ordered a cake so I wouldn't have to work my own brother's wedding. I was already rolling up my sleeves.
"You're a guest," Lauren said, weakly, one last stand at the barricade.
"I'm a guest with a profession. Lauren. Look at me." I took her by both shoulders. "Three days. Island humidity, a resort kitchen, no time, no ingredients, and a bride I love. This is the most alive I've been all year."
That part was even true. I could feel the week reorganizing itself around something that was finally mine to fix: a problem with edges, a disaster with a recipe. Flour instead of feelings. Ten out of ten, would take again.
Then Theo ruined my life, fondly, in ten words.
"E can help. Wedding running smooth is literally his job."
"He really doesn't need to—" I started.
"He's the best man," said my brother, the CEO, the delegator, already walking off toward the pavilion with the pry bar over his shoulder like a man in a musical. "Lauren's got the staff tied up on the tent flip. He's got the vendor contacts. It's done. E! You bake now!"
Lauren, to her credit, looked at me for a long second, that one-beat-too-long look again, level as a spirit gauge.
"I can put Jenna on it instead," she said.
Jenna is banned from kitchens in two countries. We both knew what she was actually asking.
"It's fine," I said, bright as new chrome. It was not fine, it was three days in a closed room with the reason I left, and there was no version of explaining that. "Many hands. It's your wedding. I'd bake with a heat rash for you."
"You already said the heat rash one."
"It's a versatile bit."
He found me in the prep kitchen an hour later, where I'd commandeered the back steel table and was writing lists the way other people pray. He knocked on the doorframe, knocked, on an open door, the last man in America, and stood there holding the folder.
"I called the mainland," he said. No preamble.
Preamble is for people who haven't rehearsed.
"Marchetti's can't remake in time and won't ship.
So I went the other way. Flour, butter, sugar quantities off your list from the fortieth-birthday cake.
I had the sizes from Lauren's file. There's a restaurant supplier on the two o'clock ferry tomorrow with cake rounds, boards, dowels, a hundred and fifty count of eggs, and something called a turntable, which I assume is not for records.
The Larkspur's kitchen is yours nightly from ten, after staff service.
Curro's putting a lock on the walk-in so nobody's kids eat your components. " A breath. "Tell me what I missed."
I looked at my list. He'd built it already.
He'd built it from memory of a cake I made for Theo last year and a laminated file and whatever machine lives in him that turns worry into logistics, and for a second, one, single, unauthorized second, the kitchen felt like a market stall at seven in the morning.
"Gelatin," I said. "For the flowers. Sheets, not powder."
He wrote it down like I'd handed him a stock tip.
"Ten o'clock, then," he said, at the door.
"Ten o'clock."
He left. I stood in the empty kitchen with my lists, in the walk-in hum, in the smell of somebody else's mise en place, and did not think about the last time the two of us had built something with our hands on a deadline, because I am a professional, and because if I started I knew exactly which memory was next in the queue, and it's the one with the wet grass in it.
"Gelatin," I said, out loud, to no one. The kitchen had opinions. It kept them to itself.