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A couple hours later, after eating the leftover French toast (almost as delicious as freshly made), we were setting up in the social hall of their synagogue. Long tables lined the cavernous, high-ceilinged room, with place cards marking each team’s designated location. Bev, Benjamin, Seth, and I walked down the aisles of dirty green carpet beneath the huge chandelier, looking for our names.

Bev and Benjamin found theirs first. “Oh, this must be a mistake,” she said, looking at the settings on either side of hers. “You two should be next to us.”

“Oh, too bad, I wonder what happened,” Seth said in such a monotonous rush that I knew immediately he’d called the synagogue ahead of time and requested it. A tiny bit of passive-aggressive revenge.

We found our station at the far end of the room, near the door. Which satisfied me in a sad sort of way. I hated to even think it, but one thing I automatically did when being in a Jewish space was clock the exits. Just in case. We had enough room at the long table where we could stand side by side and only elbow each other if we were both using our elbows at the same time.

The cookies we’d be decorating weren’t there yet, but sitting on our station were some basics we’d need for the task ahead: frosting; little tubes of food coloring; a few different kinds of fun sprinkles. It looked as if there were more elaborate decoration options at a table along the side of the room, set up as first come, first serve.

All of my time lounging on the couch watching competition shows on the Food Network after Connor left me was now about to come in handy. “I think our strategy should be to run over and take the most desirable decoration options on that table first,” I said in a low voice, leaning into Seth’s ear so that he could hear me but the adorable old couple on my left couldn’t. “Granny and Gramps over here can’t make winning sparkly cookies if there aren’t any sparkles for them to use.”

Seth looked over at them. Granny and Gramps grinned cheerfully at us and waved enthusiastically in unison over their matching plaid aprons. He looked back to me. “You know, why bother with all the subterfuge? Maybe I should just tackle them if they try to take the sparkles. They can’t make winning sparkly cookies if they both have broken hips.”

“I didn’t realize you were that hard-core.”

“To be very clear, I was being sarcastic,” Seth said. “You understand that was sarcasm, right?”

I ignored him. “We also want to think originality. Humor is good. Neither of us are super artistic, so we can’t rely on making the most beautiful cookies and winning on that. No, we need to make the judges laugh.”

“You do realize the prize for this is a gift card to a really mediocre kosher restaurant, right?”

“No, Seth.” I tapped the side of his head solemnly. “The prize for this is winning. The knowledge that we are the best.”

“Will the knowledge that we are the best cookie decorators among a small subset of Upper West Side Jews help you sleep at night?”

“No,” I said. “It will animate the very core of my being.”

He shrugged. “Okay, in that case, you run for the sparkles and I’ll threaten Granny with our frosting knife.”

I held back a smile as a middle-aged woman I assumed was a volunteer approached each table with a box of plain cookies. That smile might have burst fully onto my face if she and I hadn’t recognized each other at the same time. My smile evaporated, sinking back into my throat where it formed a lump. Her eyes widened. “Abby Cohen, is that you?”

I couldn’t speak. All I could do was nod.

Mrs. Landskroner had clearly aged in the ten years since I’d seen her, but there was no mistaking my old Hebrew school teacher. She had to be in her late sixties or early seventies now, but her hair was still a glossy brown, and either makeup or good plastic surgery had softened the wrinkles around her eyes and mouth. She smiled wide at me. There was a tiny smudge of lipstick on her front teeth. “Well, look at you. You’ve grown.”

Mrs. Landskroner hadn’t just been my Hebrew school teacher. She’d been my mom’s good friend. As much as my mom had good friends anyway.

I forced a smile. “That’s usually what happens after ten years.”

She set the white cardboard box of cookies on our station. “And who’s this?”

“This is Seth,” I said. It probably would have been a Good Fake Girlfriend thing to do to introduce him as my boyfriend, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. Word would get back to my parents, one hundred percent. Mrs. Landskroner would probably text my mom the next second she got to herself. And then what? I’d left here for a reason. I didn’t want my parents knowing anything about me.

So I just kept it at that as I grabbed the box of cookies and opened it up, staring down at them as if I’d never seen anything more interesting than plain, slightly burnt sugar cookies in the vague shapes of menorahs and faces and Stars of David.

Mrs. Landskroner touched my shoulder gently. That, plus the scent of her lilac perfume, sent me tumbling fifteen years back into the past.

My skin crawled. I wanted to be anywhere other than here even though I wanted to ask her what my parents had told her about my move to Vermont, how they’d slanted it to make them look good and sad and self-sacrificing and me look bad and selfish and mean.

“Ellen!” someone called from down the line. Mrs. Landskroner’s head whipped around. Her hand withdrew from my shoulder, and I had to hold myself back from rubbing the feeling of it away.

“Be right there!” she called back, and then, with a quick smile over her shoulder at me, she was striding to the aid of whatever cookie-based problem the other volunteer was having.

My underarms were suddenly all sticky. How was I supposed to make funny, original cookies when this piece of my past was lurking about?

“Abby,” Seth said, his tone that of someone repeating something for the third or fourth time. “Abby, are you okay? You look a little shaken up.”

I caught a quick glimpse of myself in the reflective window behind us. To my own eye, I looked the same as always: vaguely annoyed. How could he see anything more than that when I couldn’t see it myself? “I’m fine.”