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The wood-fired stove crackled. Outside, faint and far away, Emily could hear the last of the tree lighting crowd making their way home, their voices carrying through the cold night air.

“How many batches?”

“I’ve stopped counting.”

Cassidy thought that over. Then she picked up the thermos, unscrewed the top, and poured two cups of hot buttered rum. She slid one across to Emily.

Emily picked it up. The smell of butter, rum, and spices was enough to make her shoulders drop.

“Tell me about your nana,” Cassidy said.

Emily looked at her.

“Not the recipe. Her.”

Emily wrapped both hands around the cup, leaned against the counter, and thought about where to start.

“She taught me everything,” she said finally. “Not just baking. Everything. How to be patient. How to make someone feel like the most important person in the room. How to feed people in a way that went beyond just food.” She paused. “This bakery was hers before it was mine. I used to sit on that stool right where you’re sitting and watch her work. She never measured anything. She just knew. She had this way of—she’d be talking to you, really talking, really present, and her hands would just be moving, and the most perfect thing would come out of the oven twenty minutes later like it had always been going to.”

“She sounds incredible.”

“She was.” Emily took a sip of the rum. “I want to win this for her. I know that sounds small. The City Rescue Mission is the whole point, and I care about that, I do. But underneath that—” She stopped. “She hid that recipe because she was tired of the fighting. And now she’s gone, and the recipe is here, and the bake-off is back, and I just—” She pressed her lips together. “I want to get it right. I want her to have won, in the end. Even if it’s so many years late.”

The bakery was very quiet.

Cassidy picked up her cup and was quiet for a moment too.

“My nana gave me my cocoa recipe,” she said, pulling out her nana’s locket she kept around her neck. “If something had happened to that recipe before I’d fully made it mine, I would have been heartbroken. So I understand. I understand completely.”

Emily nodded. Her throat felt tight in a way she wasn’t going to do anything about.

“I’m not leaving tonight,” Cassidy said simply. “We’re going to figure this out. Both of us, together, for however long it takes.” She held up the thermos. “And I brought reinforcements.”

Emily laughed, which was not something she’d expected to do that evening. “How much is in there?”

“Enough,” Cassidy said. “Possibly too much. We’ll find out.”

They baked.

Batch after batch, working through the possibilities. Too much cinnamon. Not enough molasses. The wrong ratio of butter. Cassidy tried to decipher the ingredients from the smudged recipe card while Emily measured and mixed, and they tasted everything and argued about everything and refilled their cups somewhere around batch four and stopped caring quite so much about the outcome somewhere around batch five.

The bakery smelled extraordinary. Layer upon layer of warm spice building up in the air until it felt less like baking and more like being wrapped in something. The fire crackled. The snow fell softly outside the window. Maple Falls was quiet and dark except for the Christmas lights on Oak Way, back on after days of nothing, casting colored pools of light on the fresh snow.

“What if it’s not about the amounts?” Cassidy said, at some point in the late evening, perched cross-legged on the counter with her cup balanced on her knee. “What if it’s about the order? Like, what if she added things in a specific sequence?”

“That’s—actually.” Emily paused. “That might be it.”

She started again. This time she changed the order, adding the wet ingredients in reverse order, and letting the butter brown just slightly more than usual before she pulled it back.

She wasn’t sure when the rum had gone from warming to relaxing, but her hands felt loose and her measurements were more intuitive than precise and she was singing along to the Christmas music playing from her phone on the counter, and at some point, she stopped second-guessing herself and just baked the way Nana had always baked. Present, and talking, and not watching her hands.

The batch went in.

Twenty minutes later, she pulled it out.

She stood in front of the cooling rack and said nothing for a long moment.

Cassidy appeared at her shoulder.