Her Husband's Ex-Girlfriend Came Back for Him

Chapter 1

By six o’clock, the bride had lost her head twice, and Summer was beginning to take it personally.

She stood behind the bakery counter with a cocktail stick between her teeth, considering the small white body of the bride figurine on the cake while a woman outside pressed a phone against the window.

The woman had been photographing the display for nearly a minute.

Summer hoped she appreciated the wedding dress, which had taken longer to make than the rest of the dead bride and groom combined.

“If she falls off again, leave her,” said Macy, her assistant. She had her coat on and the weary determination of someone who had already stayed twenty minutes past the end of her shift. “It’s Halloween. Put the head in his hand and charge extra.”

Summer took the stick from her mouth. “They’ve been married twenty years.

I don’t think she wants him holding her severed head at the anniversary party.

” She glanced at the order form, where the customer had underlined scary cute rather than scary gruesome.

The distinction had seemed manageable on Wednesday, before anyone attempted a veil.

“You haven’t met my parents.” Macy put the last tray into the rack and pulled the cover down over it. “There. Everything for tomorrow that can be done tonight is done. Please notice the word tomorrow. It means you don’t have to come in and do it again before I get here.”

Summer bent to check the cake at eye level, partly because the bride needed examining and partly because Macy had started looking at her.

Sunday was supposed to be her day off. She had taken only three in the year since buying the bakery, and on one of those she had come in to receive a flour delivery in the pantsuit she had intended to get married in.

Her mother still mentioned that whenever Summer claimed she knew how to delegate.

“I might stop by,” she said, returning the bride to her little mound of buttercream. This time the head held. “Just to see how busy you are.”

The bell above the door rang before Macy could answer.

Jonah came in sideways around a family studying the prices in the window, carrying a paper bag against his chest. A small boy in a skeleton costume followed him over the threshold, saw the empty display case, and retreated with an expression Summer recognized from customers who had arrived too late for the cinnamon rolls.

“Tell your wife she’s not working tomorrow,” Macy said. She had already retrieved her bag from beneath the counter, leaving the matter with Jonah as if it were a tray he had offered to carry. “If she turns up, I’m making her stand in line.”

Jonah looked at Summer, then at the cake. “Have you finished that? Because there’s a woman outside telling her husband you put real bones in the cake.” He set the bag down beyond reach of the buttercream and waited while Summer gave the bride a cautious tap with one fingernail.

Macy left while he was still taking off his coat.

Summer locked the door behind her and watched her slip between two tour groups without slowing.

Across the street, a man in a long cloak held a lantern beneath an upstairs window, telling visitors how long a woman had waited there for a husband lost at sea.

Summer had heard the story three times that afternoon.

Now someone upstairs dragged the curtains shut, and the guide raised his voice over the rattle of the rings.

“Did you eat?” Jonah asked. He was unwrapping a sandwich when she came back, and she wished she had thought to throw away the untouched yogurt beside the register.

His eyes moved toward it, but he only pushed half the sandwich across its paper toward her.

“Before you tell me about the piece of cake you tasted at eleven, I mean.”

“I had a raspberry bar too.” She picked up the sandwich and found he had remembered to ask for no tomato. The bread was still warm where the foil had held it. She took a large bite.

He had started bringing food after the miscarriage, appearing with soup or something his mother had made and sitting down while she ate, just to make sure she did.

Now she sometimes wanted to tell him she could be trusted with lunch again, except that she had spent the afternoon within reach of a refrigerator and proved otherwise.

“You can say it,” she told him. “I should have stopped for lunch. There, I’ve saved you the trouble.”

Jonah had been trying to see the back of the cake. “I was wondering why the groom has both his arms and she’s only got one. But yes, you should have stopped for lunch.”

She laughed, though she hadn’t meant to. “Her other arm’s behind him. She’s holding his hand.” Summer turned the cake stand so he could see the tiny joined fingers. Jonah leaned closer, and the interest on his face made her glad she had bothered.

“Look at those fingers,” he said. “How did you get them to stay together? I’d have ruined the whole thing trying.” He reached for his sandwich again, still bent over the little hands.

His own work involved pricing renovations for a small contractor. He liked asking how her cakes stood up, then finding the dowels she’d hidden inside them.

She asked Jonah to hold the box open, and together they lowered the cake into it. He held his breath until it was safely down.

“We could go somewhere tomorrow,” she said as he folded the lid. She’d looked at the weather over breakfast. Rain here, a better chance of sun farther up the coast. “Somewhere we can park without showing a utility bill to prove we live here.”

“We could,” he said, holding out a label while she secured the corners. “You’ve found somewhere, haven’t you? You were looking at something over breakfast.”

There was a place up the coast that sold old furniture and opened late on Sundays.

She wanted a kitchen table with enough room to roll pastry at one end while someone ate at the other, preferably a table without a groove around the edge to collect flour.

She had looked at the photographs online three times.

“Maybe we could look at tables.” She pressed a label over the fold and smoothed it twice. “Ours is all right. It’s just too small.”

“Ours wobbles because you keep taking the bit of cardboard out from under the leg.” Jonah lifted the box, and she stepped ahead to open the refrigerator. “I could fix that, you know. You don’t have to buy another table.”

“I know you could fix it.” She moved a tray to make room for the cake.

“I like the other one.” His table had come from his grandmother’s house, along with the chairs and the big dresser Summer had spent a Sunday polishing.

She hadn’t objected to any of them, but it would be nice to have something they’d picked out for themselves.

Jonah set the cake on the cleared shelf. “Then let’s go and look. I thought that wobble was bothering you.” He stayed beside her while she checked that the lid cleared the shelf above. “Does it come with chairs? Mom will want these back if we don’t need them.”

She rested her forehead against his chest, letting the refrigerator hum behind them. A button was missing below her cheek. She put her finger through the gap and touched his warm skin; his hand settled at the back of her neck.

“You’ll have to get up before nine,” she said. She could feel his laugh before he answered, and she lifted her head so he could kiss her.

“For furniture? That seems excessive.” He kissed her again anyway, slower this time, until she forgot the uncovered sandwich on the counter. His phone began vibrating against her hip, stopped, then started again. Summer drew back far enough to let him reach it, still holding the edge of his shirt.

She was watching his face when he read the message. He laughed under his breath and tilted the screen toward her, showing a photograph of an open suitcase with a pair of boots laid across it.

“Kylie,” he said. “She’s coming home Tuesday.” His thumb moved to the next message before Summer had finished reading the first.

Summer kept her hand on his shirt while he read. Outside, the woman photographing the cake tapped the window to ask whether they were still open; Summer shook her head and turned back to Jonah.

“For a visit?” Summer asked. She looked at the suitcase again. “Or is she staying?”

“Staying, I think.” He began typing, then stopped. “She mentioned a museum in Boston. I don’t know if that’s definite.”

Summer let go of his shirt so he could finish.

She had seen the name often enough on his phone that it ought to have been no more unsettling than his mother’s, and yet she felt a heavy weight settle in the pit of her stomach.

Another message arrived. Jonah smiled at the screen, and she went to throw the empty sandwich paper away.