“No.” He looked at her. “It doesn’t.”
The walk-in door opened. Lou emerged with a bowl of ganache, took in the two of them standing on opposite sides of the prep island in the overly careful way of people who had just said something and not yet decided what to do with it, and set the ganache down without comment.
He picked up his piping bag. “The last twelve need silver on the points.”
Margot handed Evan the piping bag. He took it and went back to the cookies. She held the pan steady.
Lou watched them work in the easy rhythm they’d fallen into without discussing it. He piped a small star onto a finished cookie, assessed it, and nodded. “That is a good batch.”
Chapter twenty-seven
The Christmas Lady
Margotknewthebakingdemo was headed for disaster the moment Lou flipped the mixer to high with the guard still off.
The event started well enough.
Lou had set up a demonstration table on the terrace with a portable mixer, three kinds of cookie dough, and a station where guests could pipe icing onto cookies cut in the shape of sailboats and starfish.
Twenty folding chairs sat full beneath the morning sun. Beyond the railing, the ocean stretched into a flat blue line, and the breeze carried the smell of warm sugar and sunscreen across the crowded terrace.
For ten full minutes, nobody mentioned the stolen ornaments.
Standing near the back with a clipboard tucked under her arm, Margot let herself breathe.
Then Lou’s portable mixer launched a bowl of royal icing off the table.
The bowl hit the concrete, bounced once, and sent a spray of white frosting across the first two rows of guests. A woman in a yellow sundress yelped. A little boy started laughing and couldn’t stop. Lou stood behind the table with his hands raised, icing on his apron, his cheek, and the brim of his baseball cap, surveying the damage with the calm of a man who had ruined a great many batches in his time.
“That,” he announced, “is why we always start on low speed.”
The crowd loved it. Phones came out. The woman in the sundress took a selfie with the icing still on her arm, and the little boy demanded to know if it would happen again.
Margot grabbed towels from the kitchen and helped Lou wipe down the chairs while he turned the disaster into a lesson on mixer settings and the sacred importance of a splash guard. He never once stopped talking. By the time the last chair was clean, half the crowd had decided he was the best part of the expo.
By the time the demo resumed, the mood had shifted from polite interest to genuine warmth. People were laughing, asking questions, lining up at the station with their kids. Lou handed her a cinnamon star on his way past. She ate it leaning against the railing, watching the crowd, and for a moment the expo felt like what it was supposed to be. Not a crime scene. A celebration.
A woman with two little girls was piping green icing onto a cookie with intense concentration. One of the girls tugged Margot’s sleeve. “Are you the Christmas lady?”
“I guess I am.”
“My cookie has too much icing. Is that okay?”
She crouched down to look. The cookie was more icing than cookie, a green mountain with a starfish base somewhere underneath. “That is the best cookie I’ve ever seen.”
The girl beamed and went back to work, adding more icing, because if a lot was good then more was better. Margot stood, and the tightness behind her ribs eased to something almost soft. This was why she did the work. Not the contracts or the logistics or the spreadsheets. This, a kid and a cookie, and a morning that had gone wrong in exactly the right way.
The afternoon kept the streak going.
Lila ran an ornament-making workshop in the pavilion. Wire, glass beads, ribbon. Simple and beautiful. Margot heard from three different guests that Lila had been “almost nice,” which from Lila was a transformation on the order of weather.
Tessa’s bridal fashion preview on the event lawn ended when the snow machine malfunctioned and coated a model from the waist down in artificial powder. Tessa laughed so hard she had to sit down on the runway. The guests filmed all of it. The content, Tessa said later, was “better than anything I could have planned.”
Caleb was the one who got the snow machine running again, crouched over the housing with a screwdriver, waving off thanks, grinning at the bride who’d nearly been buried. Margot watched him from across the lawn and felt the day tilt half a degree. He fixed things.
He made people laugh. He was, by every visible measure, the most helpful man at the resort. And he was the reason there was a hard drive in her pocket and a detective on her calendar. The crowd adored him. Only she and Evan knew to watch his hands.
The expo was working. Despite everything, the expo was working.
