But I don’t want to cut it. It’s not truly my cake.
It’s the town’s cake now.
Maybe the mayor can cut it. Or Lorelei. Or Pia herself.
“I wish you’d been for real,” Esme says. “The way he smiled at you—swoon. How could anyone not want you to be happy together?”
“Lorelei has always been one of my favorite people. It makes sense that her brother would be, too, once I got to know him.” The words sound hollow to me.
He’s so much more than one of my favorite people.
He’s someone who made me believe that there could be someone out in this world who could love me in all my flighty, unpredictable glory. When I told him about my play—all I felt was support. Belief. Pride.
“What I want to know is whose idea it was,” Mrs. Briggs says as she joins us, also carrying a plate overflowing with food from the potluck tables.
I spot the sausage balls that the mayor brings to everything—the sausage balls that have been my second favorite after fruitcake my entire life—and the sight of them does nothing but turn my stomach.
The sight of the fruitcake did the same.
I think I hurt Dane.
I don’t know exactly how, but I think I did, and I want to fix it and I have no idea if he’d let me try.
“It was my fault,” I tell Mrs. Briggs. “I didn’t know how to tell my grandma that I didn’t want to work at the Gingerbread House, so instead of telling her the truth, I made up a fake fiancé. Dumb, right?”
“I’d say it was brilliant,” Esme says with a sweep of her arm, indicating the party where Grandma and the eldest Silver generation keep eyeing each other across the square.
I shake my head. “That wasn’t me. The brilliant part was when I told Dane and he insisted we keep up the act. For exactly this reason.”
Which he’s not here to see.
Because he’s hiding from me?
I shake my head, pull out my phone, and snap a few pictures, then text them to him. It’s what a friend would do, right?
Good job, partner. The whole town turned out to celebrate the end of The Great Silver-Anderson War.
It doesn’t show as immediately read, so I pocket my phone again.
Maybe he really did have a work emergency.
Maybe he’s tied up.
He doesn’t owe me anything. We didn’t have a real relationship.
But it certainly felt real to me.
“You were behind the letters,” I say to Esme. “How long did you have them?”
She blushes. “I first saw them in high school, but when I heard that you two were engaged, I decided it was time to share what I knew. But I couldn’t do it openly without pissing off my dad at first.”
“You knew the whole story?”
She shakes her head. “The letters never said what the dowry was. I assumed it was something like a lock of an ancestor’s hair or the confession of our serial killer great-great-however-many-times-grandfather or uncle or whatever he was.”
“You have a serial killer in your family tree?” Mrs. Briggs says reverently.
“Family secret. But since we’re airing family secrets ...”
