Page 17 of Knot in the Wedding Cards

~AMBER~

Big decisions require pastry.

That's not a personal philosophy.

It's municipal law in Honeybell Harbor, and it's why I'm knocking on the back door of Butterbell Bakehouse at seven in the morning with a tote bag full of contracts and a heart full of problems.

Juniper lets me in wearing someone else's apron and at least a cup of flour, distributed.

There's a smudge of it on her cheek, a dusting in her dark curls, a ribbon holding the whole arrangement up that has clearly lost the war by attrition, and behind her, the kitchen smells like heaven ran a stone-fruit special. Butter, brown sugar, peaches roasting in vanilla, under it all the warm sourdough smell that lives in these walls, the way salt lives in mine.

"Before you say anything," she says, "this is still temporary."

"I didn't say anything."

"You had a face." She hauls me inside past the proofing racks. "One decorating shift. That's what Maeve asked for. One shift, three weeks ago, because Odette sprained her wrist, and it's not my fault the summer menu needed somebody with vision."

The vision is spread across two full sheet trays, and I'll admit it stops me.

Little peach-shaped pastries, two domes of cake sandwiched around cream, brushed blush-and-gold, each one wearing a mint leaf like it dressed up for the occasion. They look like the fruit bowl of a minor goddess. They look, frankly, like the kind of thing I'd build a whole dessert table around, and my brain starts doing exactly that without permission, because my brain has one setting.

"Absolutely not," says Rena Charm, arriving from the walk-in with a tub of butter and the expression of a woman betrayed in her own kitchen. Butterbell's pastry chef is five foot two of classical French training, and she's pointing at a small pot of shimmer on the bench like it's contraband. "I leave for twenty minutes. Twenty. Who got out the gold?"

"The gold elevates it," Juniper says.

"It's seven in the morning. Nobody needs elevated at seven in the morning. It's breakfast, not a coronation."

"It's a peach that looks like jewelry, Rena, people will lose their minds?—"

"People need coffee and a reliable croissant. You know what gold leaf says at breakfast? It says we've priced in your divorce."

"It says summer."

"It says four dollars more a unit."

"Both things can say," Juniper says grandly, which is not grammar, which has never once stopped her, and Rena throws her hands up and appeals to me as the only adult on the premises.

I decline jurisdiction.

I've survived five years in this town by never ruling on another woman's buttercream. Anyway, I'm watching something else, because Maeve Butterfield has drifted out of the office the way she does, silent, floury, seventy years old and built entirely of forearms and judgment.

While the gold debate rages she hangs a second apron on the hook rail by the door. The hook rail where the permanent staff hang theirs. This apron is new. This apron has JUNIPER embroidered across the bib in Butterbell yellow, and Maeve places it, pats it once, and drifts back to her office without a word, and I catch the whole thing over Juniper's shoulder and file it in the drawer where I keep things my best friend isn't ready to know about herself.

Temporary. Sure. The bakery has already voted, honey.

You're the only precinct still counting.

The bell over the back door goes again, and Marlowe angles through it carrying a picture frame the size of a door, because Marlowe does not visit anywhere empty-handed, she delivers.

"Your seating chart," she announces, propping it against the flour rack. "Mahogany, 1920s, out of a hotel lobby in Seabriar. I stripped the varnish but left the wear on the gilt, because the wear is the point, and if your celebrity people want it shiny they can hire somebody with no principles."

It's perfect.

Exactly what I described to her in eleven vague words a week ago, which is Marlowe's whole gift, she hears the thing you can't articulate and then goes and finds it in a barn. There's charcoal on the side of her hand, black dust worked into the creases, and Juniper, arranging her jewelry peaches with the focus of a Renaissance master, still clocks it from six feet away, because Juniper misses nothing she can tease you about.

"You've got charcoal on you."

"Inventory," Marlowe says.