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“—what I did differently because the evidence is literally being digested right now⁠—”

“Orange zest.”

She stopped.

The kitchen stopped.

“What did you say?” Emily’s head tilted slowly, like a satellite dish adjusting its angle.

“Orange zest.” Cole set the plate down. “That one had orange zest in it. And unless I’m wrong”—he paused, checking his memory—“a hint of rum.”

The kitchen was dead silent.

Then Madison said, very quietly: “Oh my God.”

And Cassidy said: “Emily.”

And Emily’s hand went slowly to her forehead, her eyes moving somewhere far away, back through last night, through the rum and the late hour and the conversation with Cassidy and her hands moving on autopilot over the prep table.

Cole waited.

“The orange,” she said finally, to nobody in particular. “I had an orange on the counter. I was going to use it for something else, and I just—” She trailed off. “I was talking. I wasn’t thinking about what I was doing. I just⁠—”

“Zested it in,” Cassidy finished.

“Zested it in,” Emily confirmed.

Cassidy was already pulling an orange from the fruit bowl. Madison was flipping to a new page. The island had gone from funeral-quiet to rapid-fire in about thirty seconds, everyone talking at once, and Cole could feel the moment when he was no longer relevant to the proceedings.

He picked up the delivery baskets and headed for the door.

“You’re welcome,” he said to the room in general.

Nobody heard him. They were already baking.

He stood on the step outside in the cold and did what he always did when something needed processing: He ran the facts.

His grandfather’s spice cake was excellent. He knew that. The guys at the station had confirmed it. Norma Steigler had been talking about it for decades. It was a proven quantity.

What he’d just tasted was something else.

He’d spent the last week watching Emily make batch after batch of sugar and spice cookies that were good but not right, and he’d been quietly, not-very-charitably, satisfied by that. He’d figured she would enter something close but imperfect, his cake would win, and the score would be settled in the cleanest possible way—in her own kitchen, in front of her whole town—without a word needing to be said.

That calculation had just shifted.

Those cookies were something else now. Something the people of Maple Falls were going to taste and go quiet over for a moment before they started talking. The way they’d gone quiet about his grandfather’s cake for seventeen years.

And he had handed her the key.

By accident, sure. He’d taken a cookie off a plate without thinking. He’d tasted it, recognized the orange zest in the first two seconds, and said it out loud.

He could have stopped himself.

He could have said nothing. He could have finished the cookie, set the plate down, picked up the delivery baskets, and walked out. Emily would have kept making wrong batches. His lead would have stayed comfortable. The bake-off would have stayed his to lose.

Instead, he’d given his competition the missing ingredient.

And the first thing he’d felt was happiness.