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No, it wasn’t anger.

It was something closer to grief.

“I wasn’t even going to enter today,” he said quietly. “I was in the parking lot this morning deciding whether to go home.”

Emily’s chin came up. “That’s not⁠—”

“I’m telling you the truth.”

“I’m supposed to just take your word for it.”

“Yes,” he said. “You are. Because I’m telling you the truth.”

She looked at him with those haunted blue eyes, and he could see the certainty in them, the familiar architecture of it, the thing that had been there since they were in fourth grade and her lunchbox went missing and the story had already been written before anyone checked the facts. She had decided. She had always been able to decide about him faster than the evidence warranted. He had spent his whole life being decided about in this town, and he was so tired of it that he couldn’t find the bottom of it.

“The whole town knows what your family is,” she said.

The room flinched.

Cole said nothing.

He was still saying nothing when Norma Steigler’s voice cut clean across the bakery.

“Now you listen here, Emily Rose Whitaker.” Norma had a voice that could cut glass when she chose to use it, and she was choosing to use it now.

She pushed forward from her spot near the window, the I ALDERS SPICE CAKE sweatshirt bright under the lights.

“I talked to that man myself, not two hours ago, right there in that doorway.” She pointed, and the room followed her finger to the door. “He told me plain as day he was thinking about bowing out of the competition altogether. Those were his exact words—bowing out. I nearly had a heart attack on the spot.”

A murmur moved through the crowd.

“I was standing right there,” Mrs. C. said, from the judges’ table, with the measured authority of a woman who had been keeping accurate records her entire life. “I heard every word of it.”

The murmur deepened.

Cole watched Emily’s face. Something shifted in it—the certainty faltering for just a moment—the first crack in the foundation.

Then Kit raised her hand from her station, her expression turning uneasy.

“The rum,” she said. “That was me. I needed a splash for my crème brûlée, and I took it off Emily’s shelf. I set it down on my counter and completely forgot to put it back. I didn’t even think.” She looked at Emily, genuinely stricken. “I’m so sorry, Em.”

Cassidy had set down her spatula. Her cookies were on the rack, cooling, done. She looked at Emily like neither one of them liked what she was about to say.

“The oven temperature,” she said. “That was me. I turned it down for my hot chocolate cookies—I needed a lower heat for the ganache centers. When my batch was done, I forgot to turn it back up.” She paused. “I’m sorry, Em. I should have told you.”

The room turned, almost as one, to Mrs. Bishop.

Mrs. Bishop had gone pink enough to clash with her Christmas sweater. She sat very still, staring at the empty cinnamon jar. When she spoke, her voice was unusually small.

“I take the lid off,” she said. “I know I’m not supposed to, but I can never get the measurement right from the little holes, so I take the lid off and I pinch it. It’s the only way I know how to do it properly.” She paused. “I must have put it back without tightening it. I thought I had. I truly thought I had.” She looked at Emily. “I am so dreadfully sorry, dear. I would never—you know I would never⁠—”

“It was an accident,” Cole said.

He said it to Mrs. Bishop, not to Emily. But the room heard it.

The silence that followed was a different kind than before. Not the holding your breath type. This was the silence of a room that had just watched an accusation turn inside out and was now looking at the person who had made it.

Emily stood in the middle of her bakery. She had her hands on her hips, and she was looking at Norma and Mrs. C. and Cassidy and Kit and Mrs. Bishop, and Cole watched her understand, one face at a time, what had actually happened.