Barely wiping off my hand, I left smears of icing on my laptop as I opened up the crime-scene photos, flipping through and zooming in on the cupcakes.
They all had wilted frosting.
“Fuck—they weren’t her cupcakes.” I sat back.
Fuck. I’d ruined it.
Fuck. Now there was a murderer loose… and potentially after Emmie.
25
EMMIE
After we’d closed up the cupcake shop, I said goodbye to the Svensson girls. Then I gave in and cried. Chin trembling, I began measuring flour for the new cupcake recipe I was going to test.
This was the worst Christmas ever.
I uncorked my bottle of baking cognac.
“Why do I have such terrible taste in men?” I wailed to the cats, who were certain they hadn’t been fed in weeks and were starving.
Marius was probably in Manhattan in a fancy bar with a thin, pretty woman in a pencil skirt and garters, who was making bedroom eyes at him over five-hundred-dollar Scotch.
She’d never bake. All her bras and panties would match. She’d be able to go toe to toe with Marius on all his legal knowledge and make legal sex puns in bed.
Bet she didn’t just lie there over the back of a couch while he did all the work. She probably did those expensive stripper classes on Thursdays.
“Kris Kringle’s balls,” I swore as I realized I’d lost count of the flour. “I just wanted to bake some cupcakes.” I started sobbing and sank to the floor.
I couldn’t get Marius’s expression out of my head and kept thinking of how he’d accused me of murdering Brooks. Like he was so sure that I was an awful person.
Screw him.
I’d blocked his number immediately after leaving the senior center.
I’d also told Zoe to ignore him if he called her then begged her incessantly all day, asking, “Did he call? Did he email? Did he text you?”
No, no, and no.
Marius had walked out of my life just as easily as he’d walked in, leaving me with a mess to clean up.
To be fair, the rational part of me, which I was about to drown in alcohol, said Marius had technically provided thousands of dollars’ worth of free legal help, gotten me out of jail, given me not one but five orgasms, and opened my café back up.
But still…
Now is not the time for being rational. Now is the time for drunk baking.
I hauled myself upright and rummaged in a drawer for a large spoon to start remeasuring the flour.
The smartwatch, buried under kitchen gadgets, buzzed right as I was shutting the drawer.
Likes Butt Stuff:Are you really dead???
Likes Butt Stuff:You said you’d help me pay for my kids’ holiday trip to Rockefeller Center. You still gonna do it?
I took out my phone and dialed the number. “Who the hell is this?” I shrieked when a woman answered. “How many women was Brooks sleeping with?” The rage had settled in. “I can’t get one lousy man, and Brooks had a whole harem of partners that he just rotated through. What the fuck? The audacity of men.”
The woman cussed me out then hung up.
