Caleb straightens and slips through the door, a pleased blush high on his tanned cheeks. He gives us a wave and a sheepish smile that causes twin dimples to blink to life in his cheeks. Stella and I sigh in unison. “Told you to call me Caleb,” he calls to Layla.
“Your cake will be ready in a sec,” Layla offers. “Help yourself to a coffee while you wait.”
Caleb ducks behind the counter to the coffee pot and Stella leans closer to me, hiding her mouth with the back of her hand. “This is the third custom cake he’s ordered this month,” she whispers. “I think he’s gained fifteen pounds.”
I take in his trim body, legs crossed at the ankles as he leans against the counter and stares at Layla like she’s made of sugarplums and fairy-dust. Maybe all those calories are going right to his gigantic heart. I grin.
“Has she noticed?”
The smile slips from Stella’s face as she shakes her head. “She’s so used to men treating her like garbage, I don’t think she recognizes when someone has genuine interest in her.” She sighs and rubs a fingertip across her eyebrow. “I’ve got faith in Caleb, though.”
So do I, if Layla’s laugh is any indication. It bursts out of her at something he quietly murmurs over the countertop, an answering grin blooming on his handsome face.
I narrow my eyes. “Does that mean you’ve got money on Caleb?”
The last time I was here, I stumbled upon a town-wide betting pool with odds on Stella and Luka making it official; a surprisingly organized and efficient white board in the back of the firehouse with scribbled names and amounts.
Stella snickers. “Luka does.”
I eat oatmeal chocolate chip cookies until I have to unbutton the clasp of my jeans, reclined in the back kitchen across three sacks of sugar. I make a moaning sound as Layla walks by with a tray of brownies, a small square dropped neatly on my chest.
“You’re gonna kill me,” I groan.
“Death by chocolate.” Layla drops the tray on the large metal island in the middle of the room and wipes her palms against her apron. “There are worse ways to go.”
I sit up and watch as she cuts the brownies into perfect two-inch squares, her movements graceful and efficient. The whole day I’ve watched her spin around this bakehouse like a dancer, every single movement a step in an elaborately choreographed routine.
“You moved to Inglewild when you finished college, right?”
Layla hums and nods, reaching for some plastic wrap at her elbow. “I met Stella our freshman year at Salisbury. I decided to move here on a whim, really. Not much of a plan.” She presses the back of her hand across her forehead, fingertips covered in dark chocolate. “I lived with Stella for a while. We shared a tiny apartment above the service station. I’m pretty sure I smelled like oil and grease for six months straight. Beatrice hated it.”
“Ms. Beatrice?”
“Ah, yeah. I worked at the cafe for a while. She taught me everything I know about baked goods.”
Huh. I had no idea. I’m guessing Ms. Beatrice kept her shortbread recipe to herself. Layla’s eyes narrow in a secret smile, her pink lips curled at the edges. “I know Beckett gets cookies on the side. It amuses me to watch him sneak around.”
Her phone begins to rattle across the countertop and she glances at the screen. “Speak of the devil,” she mutters. She reads whatever message pops up and snorts a laugh. “Beckett says he’s running late and you should head to trivia with me. He also says we should not, under any circumstance, walk by the fountain in town. You might go careening in.”
I roll my eyes. “How long am I going to be teased about this?”
“Oh, a decade or so. Is your phone still in the pond?”
“Probably,” I say. I imagine it sitting at the bottom with the silt and the mud, an endless stream of social media alerts pinging like bubbles. The image is oddly satisfying. “What’s the likelihood Beckett is avoiding trivia?”
“Depends,” Layla hangs up her apron on a peg by the door and rolls out her neck. The amount of things this woman creates in a day is astounding. Peach tarts and warm butter croissants and donuts with fresh vanilla custard inside. She should have her own Food Network show, an entire line of cookware. “Who did he promise? You or Nova?”
“Me.”
She smiles. “Then he’ll be there.”
The bar is crowded when we arrive, several large folding tables filling the space that was empty only a few days ago. There are groups clustered together along each, chairs pushed together and everyone is dressed in—
“Are those costumes?” There is a man at the far end with his elbows resting on the table, leaves in his hair, his chest wrapped in what looks like brown paper.
Layla nods and waves to someone by the bar. “Yup. One of the rules for trivia is you have to dress to the theme if you’re on a team.”
I see a pretty young woman standing behind the man with the butcher’s paper wearing all yellow, top to bottom. She has fake vines twisting up from her sneakers to her knees. “And tonight’s theme is …”
Layla bends over a couple having a spirited discussion about mozzarella sticks and grabs a flier off the table. At the top in big bold letters, it reads GARDEN PARTY. I glance back up at the man who must be a tree, and his partner who, I guess, is a … sun?
Layla laughs. “The interpretations are always creative. Ah, there’s Beckett’s family. We can sit with them before it starts, but I want to be out of swinging distance when the questions get going.”
I follow after her through the crowd, stepping around someone with actual feathers stuck to a majority of their body. A sparrow? Who knows.
“Swinging distance?”
“It isn’t trivia night if a stool doesn’t almost go through the window.”
“What?” Her statement has me pausing right at the edge of the table we’ve been working our way towards, five heads with varying degrees of dark blonde hair bent close together and whispering. Layla clears her throat and the man closest to us shoots up in his seat, grin already pulling his mouth wide.
“Laaaaayla,” he sings, voice tilting down an octave at the end as he does his best Eric Clapton impersonation. Layla laughs and bends at the waist to kiss him on the cheek. His eyes slant to me and hold, and his grin turns mischievous. He has the same features as Beckett, but lighter somehow. Laugh lines deep by his eyes and around his mouth. I don’t notice the wheelchair until he pulls back slightly from the table, turning the wheels in my direction with one sure hand. “You must be Evelyn. My son is awfully evasive about you.”
“He’s evasive about everything,” the woman at his elbow mumbles, but she’s smiling too, familiar blue-green eyes on her kind face. Everyone at the table is wearing a different version of a flower crown, thick with seeded eucalyptus and magnolia leaves, perfect blooms of bright purple statice woven between. She pats the space across from her with a cat-that-got-the-canary smile. “Come sit with us.”
“Try not to sound like such a creep, Ness. Christ.” A small woman gripes, a french fry hanging out of her mouth like a cigarette. She gives me a little wave. “I’m Nova. I’m his favorite.”