Page 41 of Mixed Signals
“Do I have chocolate on my face?”
She shakes her head and digs her spoon back into the carton, focused entirely on wedging a caramel out from the icy depths. “You’ll text me this week?”
I peel the frozen corn from my face with a wince. “Yeah, of course. And I’ll see you tomorrow for croissants and coffee.”
She frowns at my face. “Maybe an ice pack to go, too.”
“It doesn’t look better?”
She shakes her head. I sigh.
“You win some, you lose some.”
“It felt like a lose-lose tonight,” Layla says. She hops off the back of my car and pops the lid on the ice cream.
“Nah, there was a win.”
She loops around to the passenger side, watching me from overtop the cab of the car. “I know you don’t like the picture that much.”
I kind of do, but that’s not what I’m talking about.
“I got to spend time with you, didn’t I?”
She smiles, wide and bright and beautiful.
“Oh, Caleb,” she sighs. She tugs open the door to my Jeep. “Ten out of ten.”
NINE
LAYLA
There’sa secret at the bakehouse that not even the phone tree has uncovered yet. A confidential, classified, undisclosed piece of information that I’ve held close to my chest for years. Beckett doesn’t know. Luka doesn’t know. Evelyn doesn’t have a clue. I think Stella suspects something, but she’s never questioned me about it.
I think she realizes the enormity of the secret.
“Would you hurry up?” Ms. Beatrice struggles with the industrial-sized box of shortbread cookies in her arms. “I can’t stand here like this all day.”
“It’s been twenty-three seconds,” I whisper back. I fumble with the keys in my hand. “You don’t have to hold them all day. Just until I get the key in the lock.”
On the third Wednesday of every month, Ms. Beatrice and I have an exchange of goods. She brings me three dozen shortbread cookies and I give her six pies. We sit in my kitchen in complete darkness, consult on each other’s recipes, and drink exactly two cups of coffee. She gives me a boatload of crap about how I prep my pie crusts and then she disappears back into the mist from whence she came.
It’s all very clandestine.
The entire town thinks we’re in competition with one another. We’ve carefully curated that reputation over the years with scripted conversations and intentional slights. Immature? Probably. Manipulative? Oh, certainly. We both do better business when it looks like we’re feuding. People stop by Ms. B’s in the morning to try her scones, and then come by the bakehouse in the afternoon and buy some of mine to compare. Little do they know they’re the exact same recipe.
We are the Pat’s and Geno’s of baked goods.
The reality is a lot less exciting. Ms. Beatrice took me under her wing shortly after I moved into town. I think she got tired of me doom scrolling at her countertop while I frantically searched for a job. One day she demanded I help her in the back kitchen and that was it. I was hooked. I showed up every single day before the sun and Ms. B taught me everything she knew.
She’s not nearly as scary as she likes to make everyone believe.
I finally manage to get the key in the lock and we shuffle through the back door of the bakehouse. She drops her cardboard box on the island and begins to unload it.
“Added some jelly thumbprint cookies, too,” she tells me, tossing a bag of tiny round cookies colored with dots of strawberry and apricot jam right next to my mixer. “You never get those right.”
I snort and flick on the coffee machine. “You know if people were to find out how nice you actually are, your entire persona would crumble.”
Beatrice thrives on her threatening image. She serves up frowns with her coffee and doesn’t bother with pleasantries when she drops a quiche on the table in front of you. But her lemon bars more than make up for it, so I suppose she can act however she wants.
