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He’d been thinking about it since last night. Since the walk home, since the loose battery cable, since the kitchen in the dark with Emily’s face in the low light and her mouth soft and careful against his in a way that nothing between them had ever been before. He’d lain on this narrow bed and stared at the ceiling and tried to put the competition back where it had been a week ago—something clear and purposeful, a way to settle something that had needed settling for seventeen years—and it kept slipping out of that frame.
He still wanted to clear his grandfather’s name. That part hadn’t moved.
But a bake-off wasn’t going to do it. Winning a cooking competition wasn’t going to reach back into 2009 and change what the town believed, and he knew that, and somewhere in the last week he’d stopped pretending it would. What would actually clear his grandfather’s name was the truth, and Cole was still working on finding it.
He picked up his grandmother’s photograph from the nightstand. Silver hair swept into the French twist she’d favored, pearl earrings catching the light, her smile aimed at someone just outside the frame. His grandfather, probably. She’d always looked at him like that.
He looked at the photo sometimes, just to see her face. She’d been the one who told him, years ago, that some things you carried until you understood them and some things you carried until you could put them down, and that the skill was knowing the difference.
He wasn’t sure which category this was.
Captain put his chin on Cole’s knee.
“I know,” Cole said.
He got dressed. He’d go to the bakery kitchen. He’d see how it felt when he got there.
Two hours later, Cole had done just that.
He could hear Mayor Bloomfield projecting from inside, and underneath that the sound of a crowd considerably larger than the contestant list would suggest, and something that might have been a Christmas song playing from a loudspeaker.
Cole pushed the front door open.
The first thing he saw was Norma Steigler.
Norma was standing near the front of the room in a sweatshirt she had clearly made herself, the fabric slightly uneven at the hem in the way of something cut at home, the letters ironed on in the particular font of craft store transfer paper. The letters read, in large, bold print:
I ALDERS SPICE CAKE
Cole stopped in the doorway.
Norma saw him and raised both arms above her head in a gesture of pure triumph.
“There he is!” she announced to no one in particular and everyone in general.
A small group near the window—people Cole half-recognized from the church—turned and clapped. “We’ve been waiting for a taste of your family’s cake for a long time,” she added, speaking for them all.
“Is that so?” Cole said, chuckling nervously. “I honestly wasn’t sure if I was going to make it today.”
“The weather keeping you away?” Norma asked with all seriousness.
Cole laughed. “No, not exactly. I was thinking about bowing out of the competition—”
Norma gasped the minute the word left his lips. “Good gracious! What in heaven’s sake for? Your grandpa’s spice cake is utter perfection. You wouldn’t be so cruel as to rob us for a taste when I’ve been craving it for years!”
“It was just a thought,” Cole replied, not wanting to get into his personal life in the middle of the bakery.
“Well, don’t think it for another second!” Norma exclaimed.
Cole looked at all his supporters once more. “No, no, of course not.”
Mrs. C. appeared and joined them, eyeing Norma’s sweatshirt with approval. “Well done, you. I don’t know why you don’t come to the craft club. You’re clearly talented.”
Cole took that as his cue to move on through the bakery.
The church group came to him in ones and twos, handshakes and brief warm exchanges, people telling him they remembered his grandfather’s cake and were glad it was back, and Gary Alders didn’t have to retire his cake just because he retired from the hardware store. He promised the women he’d pass the message on to his grandfather.
He was also, he realized, going to enter the bake-off.
