“My grandmother. She baked every Sunday. I’d sit on the counter and she’d let me add ingredients. Never measured. Just knew.” He set down his piping bag and flexed his bandaged hand carefully. “That’s what I’ve spent twenty-five years trying to get back to. Knowing without measuring.”
“Do you get there?”
“Occasionally.” He smiled. “On a good batch. You know when it’s right.”
“I always measure,” Margot said.
“I know you do.” Lou tilted his head toward the cookies. “But you’ve been holding that pan without thinking about it for twenty minutes. Just feeling where it needs to be. That’s not measurement.”
She looked at her hand on the pan. He was right. She’d stopped consciously adjusting and started just holding.
Beside her, Evan made a noise that might have been a laugh, very quiet, pressed back before it fully formed.
“What?” she said.
“Nothing.” He finished the last tree on the pan and set the piping bag down. “He’s right, that’s all.”
“About the measuring.”
“About the knowing without measuring.” He looked at the row of finished cookies, red and green and silver and gold, lined up on the cooling rack. “You knew this expo was in trouble before you had data for it. You knew Caleb was worth watching before we had evidence. You knew something was wrong with the power backup before I explained why.”
He handed her the last unpipped star. “You measure because it makes you feel safer. But the knowing is already there.”
The kitchen was quiet for a moment except for the hum of the refrigerators and the low tick of the cooling oven.
Lou picked up his piping bag and moved to the far end of the prep island. “I have to check on the ganache in the walk-in. Two minutes.” He disappeared into the walk-in cooler, which was either true or the most deliberate exit she’d ever witnessed from a man who’d been doing this long enough to know exactly what he was doing.
The kitchen was suddenly very small.
Margot set the star cookie on the rack and pressed her thumb against the icing to test the set. It left a mark. Still soft.
“He’s not coming back for two minutes,” Evan said.
“No.”
“I need to tell you something.”
She turned. He was leaning against the prep island, arms loose at his sides, the screwdriver still tucked behind his ear.
“When I asked you to meet me at the dock shed that first morning. With the glass shard. I told myself it was about the investigation. Finding whoever took the ornaments.” He paused. “It wasn’t only that.”
The refrigerators hummed. The walk-in door stayed closed.
“I know,” she said.
“I wanted a reason to see you again. Before the expo ended and you went back to Raleigh and I ran out of reasons.” He looked at the cookies instead of her. “I’ve been out of practice with this. All of it. I don’t know that I’m doing it right.”
“You’ve been doing it fine. Better than fine.”
He looked up. The kitchen light was unflattering, and she had icing on her cuff and her hair was moist from the humidity. She looked nothing like someone who had things under control.
And for the first time in two years, she was all right with that.
“When the expo ends,” she started.
“I know.” He said it before she finished. Not dismissing it. Holding it. “I’ve been thinking about it too.”
“It doesn’t have to be an ending.”
