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Cam laughed in spite of herself. Izzy might be a diva of the first order, but she clearly knew how much was at stake—enough, at least, to do a little homework. “Exactly,” she told Izzy. “And here, when you add the salt, grab it from the canister with your fingers and sprinkle it.”

She watched as Izzy mimicked her moves.

“Looking good. Now let me just show you how to rough-chop vegetables. It’s way easier than dicing onions, I promise,” Cam said encouragingly as she mentally crafted a sheet-pan recipe of zucchini and mint.

“When we break for lunch, I’ll finalize the new menu and walk you through it,” she said. “Then tomorrow, while I’m busy with the fete, you can practice at Birdie’s and watch more YouTube videos.”

“I wish I could come to the dinner,” Izzy said, looking genuinely wistful. “It actually sounds really fun.”

Cam brushed aside her usual annoyance at Izzy and thought about what she had said when she first arrived in Silver Cove—that she didn’t have even one true friend that she could trust enough not to dime her out to the paparazzi. Although Izzy’s life certainly looked enviable from the outside—especially filtered through her oh-so-perfect social media lens—she had given up a lot to get where she was.

Just like my mother did, Cam thought. What would things have been like if Flora’s career had taken off the way Izzy’s had? What if her mother had lived, had gotten a big break, had been famous? Would all the pain she had caused been worth it then? Flora hadn’t left behind anything for people to remember about her singing. She had always talked about recording an album but had never gotten around to it. At least Izzy would be remembered. Still, Cam wondered if Izzy felt good about the bargain she had made for herself.

By the time it was getting dark, Cam was exhausted from the menu switcheroo and from the afternoon she and Paige had spent getting the final touches ready for the next evening. She turned to Paige, tapping her gently on the arm to get her attention. Paige popped the headphones out of her ears.

“Yes, Chef?” Paige asked.

“I’m telling you, you have watched way too many episodes of The Bear,” Cam laughed. “I think we can wrap up now. Both of us need a good night’s sleep because tomorrow is showtime. The big night!”

“Yes, Chef!” Paige saluted her, and Cam just laughed.

“There’s no saluting in kitchens, silly. Let’s get out of here and go to Birdie’s, where I bet your dad is finishing up for the day, too.”

She had managed to avoid any prolonged contact with Ian since Cam had made it clear their relationship was strictly that of a client and her carpenter. Not that simply saying the words actually drove Ian out of her mind. It was one thing to say she was done with him and another to feel it. But she’d learned a phrase from Paige this week: Delulu is the solulu. It meant that sometimes the only solution to a problem was delusion, Paige had explained. For now, Cam could at least pretend that she hadn’t been thinking of him nonstop.

They got to Birdie’s a few minutes later to find Ian in the kitchen with her grandmother, Avery, and Izzy. They were standing around the table and examining several objects that Cam couldn’t distinguish right away.

“Look, girls!” Birdie said excitedly. “Look what Ian found inside the wall!” She held up a tiny leather shoe. It was clearly sized to fit a small child but the style was much more formal than modern babies’ shoes, with a thick leather sole.

“Seriously, a baby wore that?” Paige marveled, touching it gingerly. “To where, the baby office? That’s crazy.”

“I’ve actually seen this kind of thing before on other projects,” Ian said. “It was a custom in some parts of the world to leave children’s shoes inside of walls when they were being constructed. People thought they had magical powers to bring good luck to the house’s inhabitants and to keep evil spirits away.”

“You’re such a history dork,” Paige said.

“I’d put that on a T-shirt and wear it proudly,” he replied with a smile.

Birdie took the shoe, and after carefully examining it, handed it to Ian. “Can you please put it back when you build the new wall?” she asked. “That little baby’s shoe has been there all these years, keeping us safe and bringing us good luck.”

Cam didn’t want to point out the obvious—that it was a stroke of colossally bad luck that had necessitated having to open up the old wall in the first place. But it didn’t seem worth it to argue the point with Birdie at the moment. Just then, Cam spotted something else on the table. It was a bunch of crumpled-up old newspaper pages, which, upon closer inspection, she saw was a copy of the Silver Cove Weekly. She carefully smoothed out the brittle, yellowed paper.

“The shoe was wrapped in that,” Ian explained. “Although it’s not uncommon to find newspaper in old walls. People actually used it as insulation along with lots of other crazy stuff, like horsehair and even corncobs…”

“You’re geeking out again, Dad,” Paige said.

“Just earning that T-shirt,” Ian shot back teasingly.

Izzy giggled as if he had made a super-clever joke, and Cam felt annoyed, although she couldn’t say why. If Izzy wanted to flirt with Ian, why should she care?

The paper was dated 1922. Ada would have been sixteen, Cam thought, doing quick mental math. Nearly Paige’s age. She turned several pages over, and her eye was immediately caught by a photograph of several schoolchildren under a headline about the winner of a Silver Cove writing contest. She zoomed in on the photo, and one of the girls immediately jumped out at her. The sharp, tilted chin… it was unmistakably Ada! Her hair wasn’t bobbed yet, but it was pulled back from her face by a large, perky bow. She scanned the text: Ada had won in her age group for a short story.

Why hadn’t this turned up in the library’s database, the one Miles had been so proud of?

Cam peered closer and realized why. Her name had been misspelled. Ada Poulton, it read. It must have been a typo, and it explained why the article hadn’t been included in the search results under her name.

“Is that…” Avery joined Cam at her side.

“Who is it?” Paige asked.