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They both looked at the cookies.
“Try one,” Cassidy said.
Emily picked one up. Broke it in half. The smell that came off it stopped her completely.
That smell. That was the smell. She knew it from somewhere so deep it wasn’t memory so much as something in her body.
She took a bite.
The bakery went very still.
“Cassidy,” Emily said.
“Yeah?”
“I think—” She stopped. Took another bite. Closed her eyes. “I think I got it.”
Cassidy grabbed a cookie off the rack and bit into it and made a sound that was practically indecent.
“Emily,” she said. “That’s it. That’s the cookie.”
Emily stood at the counter with a half-eaten cookie in one hand and a cup of buttered rum in the other, and she thought about Nana in this kitchen twenty years ago, and the tears that came were the good kind, the ones that didn’t need explaining.
“Okay,” she said, after a moment. She set the cookie down and reached for a pen. “I need to write down everything I just did. Every single thing, in order, before I forget any of it.”
“I’ll help,” Cassidy said, already pulling out her phone. “What did you do first?”
Emily opened her mouth.
She paused.
“I—” She looked at the bowl. The counter. The spice jars. “I’m not entirely sure,” she said. “I changed the order of something. And I let the butter go longer. And I think I added something extra, but I can’t—”
She looked at Cassidy.
Cassidy looked back at her.
“The rum,” Cassidy said.
“The rum,” Emily agreed.
They stared at the thermos.
“Okay,” Emily said. “We write down everything we can remember. And tomorrow morning, when we’re sober, we see if we can get it back.”
She picked up the pen. Looked at the cookie on the counter.
Picked it up and took one more bite first, because she’d earned it.
“Your nana would be proud,” Cassidy said quietly.
Emily looked at the bite she’d taken, the warm spiced crumb of it, the smell still on her hands.
“Yeah,” she said. “I think she would be.”
TWENTY
COLE
