“What was it?”
“Wasabi. Just a little, but it ties it all together.” Her eyes light up when she talks about baking, and I miss that feeling. I haven’t had time to develop a new recipe in months, let alone play around with things like yuzu and wasabi. It’s a lot of chocolate, peppermint, and gingerbread around here.
“Sounds nice. A lot more interesting than…” I peer at the list of bakes we have to get to the network by mid-week. “Sugar cookies, pumpkin cupcakes, and pecan pie.”
Shay wrinkles her nose. “I hate pecan pie. Why would anyone choose pecan over apple or cherry?”
I also hate pecan pie, but I don’t want to bond over our shared dislike.
“Why don’t I get started on the sugar cookie dough, and you can get started on the pie dough? Then we can get them chilling while we work on the rest.”
“Sounds good. Are you a music person while you bake? Or a podcast person? You strike me as a podcast person.”
I swap my apron for a clean one from the back of the door, and frown over my shoulder. Shay is already pulling a clean mixing bowl toward her—where did she find so many bowls?—and weighing flour.
“I’m not a podcast person.”
She looks up at me, frowning. “What do you listen to while you work?”
My own racing thoughts reminding me of all the things I have to dodoesn’t feel like the right answer, so I just shrug. “Music’s fine.”
Shay hits play on her playlist and sings along to every. Single. Song.
Tomorrow, I’m bringing headphones.
10
NOELLE
When I was planning the basement kitchen, storage was my number one priority. I specifically told my contractor that I wanted more storage space than I could possibly need, and I was sure we’d achieved that. For the past few months, this kitchen has been a game changer—we keep bulk ingredients, equipment, and packaging down here, and only what we need on hand for the day upstairs.
But I never accounted for trying to squeeze an entire movie production’s worth ofextrasupplies in here.
For the last couple of days, Shay and I have been using our own ingredients. With everything being so last minute, it took the crewperson tasked with ordering everything a few days to get it all in. Thankfully, between the two of us, we had enough on hand to get started on some more basic stuff.
It’s been nice to actually get to bake again—I spend so much time doing everything else for The Enchanted Bakery, and I’ve found myself looking forward to getting stuck back into a mixing bowl the past couple of days. Today, however, has been the day from hell.
I was supposed to finish up with The Enchanted Bakery at lunchtime, but I ended up spending the whole day working onsocial media, cleaning the café floor thanks to the raging storm outside, doing admin, and putting out fires (literally). I didn’t even get the chance to tell Shay in person—I texted her that I’d be late and not to wait around for me. But when I finally make it downstairs to the basement kitchen, I find her standing in a maze of boxes.
“Holy shit.”
Shay jumps, like she was staring so intently at the boxes that she didn’t hear me come in. “I know, right? I went home to eat dinner, and when I came back…” She shakes her head, looking wide-eyed at the piles and piles of stuff. She holds up a stapled bundle of paper. “They left an inventory and a note asking us to check everything.”
So much for baking.
I close the door behind me, blocking out the howling wind. I almost want to ignore it and suggest we deal with it later, but Shay looks a little flushed, and I remember what she said about being claustrophobic. Being in the basement with the door closed while it’s stormy must be hard enough, let alone being stuck with no room to move.
“Let’s get this done quickly.” I hold out my hand. “I’ll take the list, you check the boxes,” I suggest, because that seems like it’ll distract her more.
Shay passes me the papers, and we slowly but surely check things off the list. She has a knack for finding things in the sea of boxes thatalmostimpresses me.
“Thirty pounds of semi-sweet chocolate chips—four boxes.”
“Got ’em.”
“Two boxes of white chocolate?”
“They’re here.”
