Page 88 of Faking it with my Bad Boy Crush

I walked to the bakery, and found Maya exactly where she said she'd be—flour-dusted, exhausted, radiant in the late afternoon light streaming through that same front window I'd shattered two decades ago.

"Tell me everything," she said, pulling me behind the counter before I'd even gotten through the door.

So I did. Patterson's offer, the satellite office idea, the fact that my professional future no longer hinged entirely on nine strangers deciding whether six weeks of ethical violations outweighed the fraud I'd exposed.

"This is really happening," Maya said when I finished, her hands gripping mine like she needed the physical confirmation. "We're actually going to be okay. Regardless of what the board decides."

"We're going to be okay," I agreed. "Might be a very strange version of okay that involves me commuting by ferry and possibly working as a very overqualified paralegal for a while. But okay."

"I like strange versions of okay. I've had a lot of practice with them lately." She kissed me, tasting like sugar and cinnamon and every good thing I'd stumbled into since walking back onto this island six weeks ago. "Vovô would be so unbelievably smug about all of this, you know. The window boy, all grown up, building things instead of breaking them."

"I owe him everything. This job, this life, you." I pulled her closer. "I just wish I could tell him that directly instead of through you."

"You just did." Maya smiled, soft and certain. "I think he heard it anyway."

Nine days until the ethics hearing. A lawsuit still hanging over both our heads. A future that was still, in many ways, uncertain and complicated and built on foundations that could still shift beneath us.

But standing in that bakery, in the last golden light of a Sweetheart Week Sunday, with Maya's hands in mine and Patterson's job offer in my pocket and twenty years of history finally, fully spoken aloud between us—

For the first time in longer than I could remember, uncertain felt like more than enough.

It felt like building something real.

Chapter twenty-nine

Loose Ends

Maya

Tessa burst into the bakery on Wednesday morning with the specific energy of a woman who'd just received news too big to deliver calmly, which considering Tessa's baseline energy level was already fairly dramatic, meant she nearly took out a display of pastéis de nata with the door.

"I sold it," she announced, phone clutched to her chest like a winning lottery ticket. "I actually sold it. Random House. A two-book deal. They want the whole manuscript by September."

I dropped the piping bag I was holding, not caring about the buttercream frosting. "You sold your novel?Thenovel?"

"The novel. The one about the island gallery owner and the shipwrecked sailor, which—fun fact—my agent says is 'refreshingly earnest in an oversaturated market,' which I've decided to interpret as a compliment even though it sounds slightly like an insult." She was practically vibrating. "They want to publish it next spring. Actual bookstores. Actual readers. Actual money, Maya, more money than I've made in the last three years combined. Which, considering I started it 10 years ago, is—”

“It’s incredible. This is—" I abandoned the frosting entirely and pulled her into a hug, both of us getting flour and buttercream on each other's clothes in a way neither of us cared about. "Ten years, Tessa. Ten years of rejection letters and 'not quite right for our list' and that one editor who told you island romance was 'too niche.'"

"That editor can eat her words along with a slice of humble pie, which I would very much like you to bake for me as a celebratory gesture, ideally shaped like her rejected manuscript."

"I'll get right on that. Petty Pie, coming to the Honey & Hearth menu."

"Excellent. Also, fair warning, several people on this island are about to recognize themselves in extremely thin fictional disguises, and I did not ask permission."

“I’m going to be a book character? Should I be worried?”

“Oh, no. Kaya the candy store owner’s a great character. I’m more worried about how Emily Russell’s going to react when she reads about Evelyn Russo, the magazine stall owner who…well, let’s just say I tried to capture her quirks accurately.”

“She should charge you royalties.”

"I feel like you should be grateful I changed enough details that nobody can actually sue me, given that we already have quite enough litigation happening in this immediate friend group."

I laughed, genuinely delighted, watching my best friend glow with the happiness of ten years of stubborn persistence finally paying off. Tessa had kept writing through every rejection, every skeptical relative asking when she'd get a "real job," every year that passed without the dream materializing.

"Vovô always said you'd get there," I said quietly. "He used to read your short stories, you know. Told me you had 'the patience of good bread dough'—needed time to rise, but worth the wait."

Tessa's eyes went a little glassy. "He never told me that."