She set the tart on the presentation board and stepped back.
It was beautiful. And it smelled like lavender and cream and caramelized sugar.
The judges moved from station to station. They reached station seven. The head judge cut into the tart.
The sugar top cracked — a clean, sharp snap that was audible three stations away. Beneath it, the custard held its shape for a moment, then yielded, smooth and dense, the palest purple.
The head judge took a bite. She closed her eyes.
The pastry chef took a bite and nodded slowly, the way people nod when a flavor reminds them of something they can’t quite name.
The food writer took a bite, set down her fork, and wrote something in her notebook. She underlined it.
Lexy didn’t breathe.
The next forty minutes were the longest of her life.
Then, finally, the head judge returned to the microphone.
“This year’s competition was exceptional. But one entry stood apart — for its technique, its restraint, and a depth of flavor that the judges described as,” she glanced at her notes, “unforgettable.”
“First place goes to station number seven. Lexy Baker. For her Lavender Honey Crème Brûlée Tart.”
Applause filled the ballroom. Lexy’s hands went to her mouth.
In the audience, Nans shot up from her seat clapping loudly. Ruth was clapping with her iPad tucked under one arm. Helen and Ida were clutching each other and jumping up and down.
Lexy walked to the stage on legs that didn’t feel entirely real. The head judge handed her a crystal trophy shaped like a whisk and an envelope — twenty-five thousand dollars and a feature inNew England Bakesmagazine.
She looked out at the four women who had fought a diamond smuggler and bribed a storage facility employee and driven to the storage unit in the dark to bring her a flour-stained recipe card, and she laughed. Bright and surprised, the kind of laugh that’s really just joy with nowhere else to go.
Then she went back to her station, picked up the recipe card, and held it. The wrinkled, stained, torn, beautiful card with Rose’s handwriting and her own, two women across time, sharing a kitchen they’d never stood in together.
“We did it,” she whispered.
The card didn’t answer. It didn’t need to. The tart had said everything.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
The Cupand Cake had never looked better.
The front door was new and solid. Jack had personally selected it from a catalog with the intensity of a man choosing body armor. The display cases were new too, gleaming under the warm lights, already filled with the morning’s output — and in the center case, on a raised stand with a small hand-lettered sign, Lavender Honey Crème Brûlée Tarts.
The sign read:Award-Winning Recipe. Permanent Menu Item. Don’t Ask About the Diamonds.
Lexy had debated that last line. Ida had insisted.
The back door had been replaced with reinforced steel, double-bolted, with a security camera that fed directly to a monitor behind the counter. With the money from the contest, Lexy had been able to buy the sturdiest door on the market.
The crystal whisk trophy sat on a shelf behind the register, next to a framed copy of theNew England Bakesmagazine feature. The original recipe card was somewhere safer now — a small fireproof safe in the bakery office.
It was Tuesday morning, just past nine, and the ladies were at their table by the window, with the view of Main Street and the waterfall.
Lexy walked over with a tray — five tarts, golden, perfect, the sugar tops gleaming like polished amber. She set one in front of each of them and kept the fifth for herself.
“On the house. Because I love you. But also because you’re terrifying and I’ve learned it’s best to keep you fed.”
Nans cut into her tart. The sugar cracked. The custard yielded. The lavender and honey hit her palate in a wave that was warm and floral and just sweet enough, and beneath it, something else — something that tasted like memory, like the kitchen she’d grown up in, like her mother’s hands covered in flour.
