Page 59

“I’ve tried every ratio I can think of,” Emily said.

“Cardamom?” Kit suggested.

“Batch twelve.”

“Batch twelve wasn’t right,” Cassidy confirmed, checking her notepad. “Too much.”

“Cloves?” Kit suggested.

“Batch nine,” Emily confirmed.

“Allspice?” Cassidy tried.

“Batch four, eleven, and fifteen. Different quantities each time.” Emily lowered her voice. “One day. I have one day to figure this out.”

He could feel Emily’s eyes on him. He tried to ignore it and watched Anita pack up the soup instead, thinking he shouldn’t be sitting there taking a break, not when he had deliveries to get to and a meeting with the mayor in two hours.

Most of the town was still shut down because of the snow. Businesses struggled to open, like Anita’s café, without fresh deliveries or customers willing to venture too far out.

Soon, Cole thought, soon the town would be back up and running.

In the meantime, he and the mayor were going to debrief and go over the town emergency plan. Cole had some recommendations for improvement following the blizzard, like a “check on your neighbor” system so certain business owners—cough, cough—wouldn’t be oblivious to emergencies anymore.

Kit left the cookie forensics and helped Anita pack up the baskets.

Cole thought it wouldn’t hurt just to have one more cookie.

He reached forward and took a spare cookie from a random batch. Which number, he had no idea.

He figured if these were what Emily planned to submit for the competition, his grandfather’s spice cake was a comfortable shoo-in. They were good. Genuinely good. But they weren’t⁠—

He stopped chewing.

He went very still.

He chewed again, slowly, paying attention this time.

This last cookie was different. Completely different. Something in it that the others didn’t have—something bright cutting clean through the warm spice, lifting the whole thing, making the back of his throat pay attention in a way the previous two hadn’t.

He took another bite to be sure.

At the center island, something had changed. He wasn’t sure exactly when the women had stopped talking, but the kitchen had gone quiet, and when he looked up, Emily was staring at him. Her pen had dropped to the counter. Nobody was moving.

Cole finished chewing.

“What?” He covered his mouth with the back of his hand. “What’s wrong?”

“What are you doing?” Emily’s voice was very flat and very controlled in the way that meant the opposite.

“Eating a cookie?”

“That was the last one.” She said it slowly, as if speaking to someone who needed the information in small pieces. “From the perfect batch. The one batch that turned out exactly right, the one I’ve been trying to recreate all morning.” Her voice kept climbing. “The one that I made last night when I wasn’t paying attention and cannot for the life of me remember exactly what I did, and that was the last one, it was on a separate plate, Cole, it was right there⁠—”

“Emily—”

“—and now it’s gone, it’s in your stomach, we will never know⁠—”

“Emily.”