Page 15 of Mom Com

Wilder nods, but I don’t say a word. Having him here is so outrageous that I can’t muster a response that doesn’t involve profanity.

“I was contacted a few weeks ago by our lawyer, Mr. Horowitz,” she begins. “It seems Charles had an addendum to his will that I was unaware of.”

The sound of my dad’s name makes it suddenly hard to breathe. I look at Mom, expecting to find frustration in her expression. As private as my parents were, they never withheld information from one another. But she doesn’t seem put out the way I’d expect.

“When was the addendum written?” I ask quietly, wondering why the lawyer only just revealed it.

“A couple of months before your father passed,” she replies, and the last word seems to take a physical toll on her, inflicting a heaviness that now reverberates in my own chest. But Dad passed of a heart attack, so this timing doesn’t explain anything.

Mom unfolds the piece of paper next to her plate, taking her glasses from the breast pocket of her blazer. She sighs, opening her mouth to read, but hesitates.

“If it’s easier,” Wilder says with genuine concern, “I’ll happily offer to read it for you.”

My eyes flick to his face, my annoyance surging at his continued intrusion into this deeply personal moment. But I don’t say anything, my voice lost in my tight throat.

“No, that’s quite all right. But thank you,” Mom says and concentrates on the paper once more. “I, Charles DeLuca, declare this to be a codicil of my will, to take effect one year after my death.” She begins slowly. “All allocations are to remain the same, with the exception of There’s Nothing Batter Bakery, which I previously bequeathed to my wife, Eleanor DeLuca, should she survive me.”

My heart thunders in my chest and my stomach twists, guilt grabbing ahold of me like a fierce undertow.

Dad sits on the couch across from me, placing his glass on the table between us. “You’ve been here for less than forty-eight hours and you’re already leaving,” he says like an accusation.

I shift uncomfortably. “My job—” I start.

“Your job at that restaurant,” he says like it’s a fast-food place.

I frown. “Yes, my job at thatMichelin-starredrestaurant.”

“Where you’re working for free,” he continues.

My chest tightens as he diminishes my accomplishment. “I’m in training, which is how things are when you start.”

“Madeline, don’t snip at your father,” my mother says, stirring her teacup and taking a seat next to my dad. Always in league, these two, so much so that I often feel like I’m on the opposing team.

I open my mouth and close it again, shaking my head instead of voicing the obvious. There’s no winning here.

My mother looks from my dad to me. “I think what your father’s trying to say is that you have a perfectly good job here in Haverberry Cove, yet you prostrate yourself to these flashy Hollywood types for no reason.”

I exhale, trying to rein in my reaction. I worked nights for years so I could put myself through culinary school. I worked my way up from bad to mediocre restaurants, proving my skill in each one, finally landing a job working for one of the best pastry chefs in LA, and they dismiss it like it was nothing. “Besides the fact that I don’t want to live here,” I say, hurt and frustrated. “Working at the bakery in Haverberry is your dream, Dad, not mine. I prefer to make my own way in LA.”

My mother’s eyes widen. “That’s your father’s life’s work you’re talking about. A little respect.”

Why did I come back here? Why did I think it would be any different? “But it’s okay to dismiss everything I’ve done for the past five years?”

“This Los Angeles life isn’t you, all these nouveau riche people trying to step on each other to get ahead,” Mom says with a wave of her hand like I’m too young to see myself clearly. You’d think she was the queen instead of a housewife to a modest baker. “If things had gone the way they were supposed to you’d have gone to Vassar and you’d be here working with your father.”

My eyes flit to Dad, but he stares at the fireplace, his eyebrows pushed forcefully together. From the time I was little, I talked endlessly about growing the bakery. Mom wanted me to go to school first, Vassar, she suggested, just like she and her mother had, so I could learn everything there was to know about business and then bring that knowledge home with me. And I loved the idea, clung to it, maybe because I was on a mission to gain her impossible approval or maybe the reason was softer and more fragile than that, my way of claiming both my parents, binding us together like the unit I so desperately wanted us to be. But things are different now—they’re broken—and there’s no way to put the pieces back together.

I press my lips into a hard line. It always comes back to this. “By things going the way they were supposed to, you mean if I hadn’t gotten pregnant?”

Dad sighs and shakes his head. “You get so worked up, Madeline. You’re so busy being angry with me and your mother that you miss what’s right in front of you.”

My mother looks up at me for a split second and my eyes search hers. “Ownership of There’s Nothing Batter Bakery shall heretofore be transferred to my daughter, Madeline DeLuca.”

Guilt thumps along with my pulse, thundering in my temples and making me contract.

Mom pauses. “And to Wilder Buenaventura in equal parts.”

My heart stutters and I choke on my coffee, wiping it from my mouth with the back of my hand. My mind does somersaults, trying to make sense of her words—her nonsensical impossible words.