Page 60 of The Beach Shack Legacy

“I’m sorry,” Stella said.

Anna lifted one hand off the table an inch and put it back down. She’d heard. Not now. It wasn’t fixed by that.

Meg opened her eyes.

“When this is over—not now,” Meg said, and she said it gently, and the gentleness was harder to take than anger. “I’m going to show you how the ordering works. The event orders, the specials, how a promise gets made and what it costs downstream when it doesn’t get kept. You need to see the whole thing. Because your baking is big enough now to break something without touching it, and you didn’t even know it could happen.” She closed her eyes again. “That’s not a punishment. That’s just where you are now.”

Letty’s rugelach sat half-finished on the racks where the morning had abandoned it, and nobody had said one word about it all day, because it was the kind of thing they’d chosen over the quince without knowing there was a choice, and it still had to be made tonight, all of it, before anybody got to stop.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

The rugelach took until past midnight and then some, and for the first hour neither of them said anything that wasn’t about the rugelach.

That was fine with Stella. There was a rhythm to it—she rolled and Joey filled, or he rolled and she filled, and the trays went in and came out and cooled on the racks that had held the party’s ruin that morning, and the kitchen smelled like butter and cinnamon and the particular apricot Letty’s card had specified in a hand that pressed hard on the no substitutions. They were good at it. That was the thing Stella kept not saying. In the worst hours of the worst day they’d made for this family, standing in a kitchen they’d nearly wrecked, they were good at this, and it was the only part of the whole day that felt like anything but a mistake.

“These are better than the ones this morning,” Joey said, holding one up to the light like it might have a serial number.

“The ones this morning got made in a panic.”

“These are getting made in a different panic.” He set it down and squared it to the others on the tray, because Joey squared things, because the world held still when the corners lined up. “A calmer panic. A panic with more information.”

“That’s not a thing.”

“Everything’s a thing if you write it down.”

She laughed, which surprised her, because she hadn’t thought there was a laugh anywhere in her after the day she’d had, and it came out anyway, and Joey looked down at the tray and lined up a corner that didn’t need lining up, pleased with himself and pretending he wasn’t.

They worked. The trays went in.

“I like this,” Stella said, to the oven, not to him. “That’s the stupid part. I like this more than anything I did all year and I found that out on the day we nearly burned the place down.”

“You didn’t nearly burn the place down. There was never a fire. The risk was entirely to the supply chain.” He filled a row. “But I know what you mean.”

“Do you?”

“I do the count in my head when I bake. The stress count. It goes down.” He said it plainly, like a reading off a gauge. “Everything I’m behind on, everything I haven’t done, the emails—it all goes quieter when there’s a tray in the oven and a timer running. It’s the only time the numbers stop.” He filled another row. “It’s a documented effect. I have a card on it.”

“Section nine,” Stella said.

“Coping strategies with measurable outputs. You remember.”

“I remember.”

She rolled the next one. She’d noticed the thing she was about to say for weeks and never said it, because saying it was an inspection and you didn’t inspect Joey, and now it was the middle of the night and the family was gone and there was nobody to hear her get it wrong.

“You haven’t gone to a study group since May.”

Joey didn’t look up. “The rotation changed.”

“The rotation didn’t change. You changed it.” She kept rolling. “And your textbook’s been in your bag since you brought it in. The new one. Next term’s. I’ve watched you carry it in and out of here for weeks and I’ve never once seen it open.”

“I read the back.”

“You read the back.”

“Twice.” He set down the row he was filling. He didn’t pick up another. “It’s a good back. It describes the book accurately.”

And there it was, the door she’d been knocking on, open a crack, and she did not shove it, because you didn’t shove Joey either. She waited, then she rolled another one.