“Yeah,” she said as she discreetly dabbed at the tears forming in her eyes. “I’ve been chasing stories for a long time. I want to know what happily ever after feels like.”
EPILOGUE: AUTUMN
GET IN THE VAN
Ten Months Later
“Oh my God,” I groaned as I sucked the melted chocolate off my thumb and grabbed my pencil. “New favorite for sure.”
Ryan scoffed. “That one isnotbetter than the cookies we got from that bakery outside of Union Square, and they’re definitely not better than Penelope’s Bakeshop.”
I scoffed. “Of course, they’re not better than Penelope’s Bakeshop, but they’re definitely better than Union Squareandthe fancy place on 11th Street.”
Ryan looked at me as if I had lost my mind. “Better than 11th Street? Try again, cupcake. You just don’t like innovation. Those were the sourdough cookies and they were banging.”
I let out a loud laugh. “I don’t want sourdough in my cookies! I want cookies that taste like cookies!”
Ryan and I were celebrating our second National Chocolate Chip Cookie Day in style—tackling every bakery in New York City that we could reasonably get to.
We were between stops, having spent the last three months in Michigan before we headed to Louisiana for the fall.
Pam had come to visit us while we were staying on Lake Charlevoix, but we were overdue for a trip to see her and made the trek back to New York before we made the move to Baton Rouge.
“Your scorecard is so fucked, Wills,” Ryan said with a laugh as he tore into the next bakery box.
We had upgraded from simple tallies of one through ten, and now gave points for presentation, price, chip to cookie ratio, chocolate quality, freshness, and texture. It had led to a rather lively afternoon of cookie debate.
I don’t know why I was surprised. We were ridiculously competitive.
“You’re scoring the weird cookies too high,” I said as I took a sip of excruciatingly bitter coffee to cleanse my palette. “This is about thebestchocolate chip cookie. Not the most unique one. Anyone can make something weird. It takes true skill to make a classic chocolate chip cookie that stands out above the rest. When’s Pam getting back? She’s going to have to be the tie breaker on some of these, because you’re being unreasonable.”
Ryan cackled around a bite. “Unreasonable?”
“Uh huh,” I said as I reached for a brown paper bag and pulled out the next cookie to try. “You’ve lost your cookie rating ability.”
He grinned at the good-natured banter. “You’re just mad that there’s the possibility of there being a better cookie out there than the ones from Manhattan.”
“Spoiler alert,” I said as I broke the cookie in half. “These are all from Manhattan.”
“Manhattan,Kansas,” he said.
I popped a piece of the cookie in my mouth, then immediately froze as the perfume taste coated my tongue. Ibolted for the kitchen and spit the bite straight into the trash. “What the hell was that?” I shouted as I turned on the kitchen sink, tipped my head to the side to suck in a mouthful of tap water, swished it around, then spat it down the sink.
“Uh . . .” Ryan paused as he rummaged around for the list we had made of all the different cookies. “Those were the lavender chocolate chip cookies from the bakery we stopped at on the Upper East Side.”
I pretended to heave as I went back to my seat at the table. “Rich people have terrible taste in cookies.”
“It can’t be that bad,” Ryan said.
I handed him the other half of the cookie, and watched with twisted satisfaction as he popped it in his mouth.
The first chew was normal, but he had no idea what he was in for. Then, his face froze. Ryan grabbed an empty bag and spit it out. “That tastes like chocolate soap!”
“See?!” I shouted as I handed him my cup of coffee so he could get the taste out of his mouth. “Do you believe me now?”
Ryan shuddered. “That was a crime against sweets.”
“Agreed.”
