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“I organized it.” She looked at him pointedly.

“Which seems to have fixed things.”

Mara glanced toward the front, where Matilda was carrying out a finished tray without asking where the next one belonged. “For the moment.”

By the time the morning slipped toward noon, Mara had stopped checking every pastry before placing it on the tray. When she wasn’t sure, she asked rather than guessing.

“Has anything ever gone this wrong here before?” Mara asked as she leaned back against the counter, enjoying a well-deserved cup of coffee.

Gabe thought about it. “Not exactly like this. I lost a refrigerator once, which felt catastrophic until half the town offered the use of their coolers.”

Mara laughed. “That sounds very Bear Creek.”

“It was. Dana showed up with two, Wes brought three, and Evan arrived with one big enough to store a body.”

She looked at him.

“We didn’t store a body in it.”

“I’m glad you clarified.”

Gabe smiled. “What about you? You must have had events go wrong.”

“Oh, plenty. Weather. Power. Caterers stuck in traffic. Once a venue told us at seven in the morning that the room we’d booked for four hundred people was no longer available.”

Gabe stopped what he was doing. “What did you do?”

“Found another room.”

“Just like that?”

“No.” Mara laughed. “There was nothing ‘just like that’ about it. I spent three hours moving tables, calling suppliers, and persuading a hotel manager that a ballroom he swore was impossible to use was actually extremely possible. But the guests didn’t know any of that.”

“You liked it.”

She looked surprised. “The disaster?”

“Fixing it.”

Mara considered that while she spooned filling onto the next pastry. “Yes. I think I did. The plan matters, but it isn’t the thing you’re trying to protect. Sometimes you have to let the plan go.”

Gabe went still. Then his gaze moved to the production sheet Karina had left behind. They had been following it all morning. And they were still falling behind.

His bear lifted his head. She sees it too.

Mara had gone quiet. She was looking at the same sheet. “Gabe,” she said slowly, “are we trying too hard to save the wrong thing?”

“What do you mean?”

Mara pulled Karina’s production sheet closer. “What absolutely has to be there tomorrow?”

Gabe wiped his hands and came around the table. “All of it, ideally.”

“That isn’t what I asked.”

He looked at the list again. She was right. He was still thinking like a baker with a full menu to protect, not someone trying to get a fundraiser through one bad day. “The cinnamon bears have to be there,” he said. “Those are mine, and people are expecting them. Karina promised the hand pies, the morning buns, and two other pastries.”

“Promised those exact things?”