Magnolia stands. Plants both hands flat on the top. The ash from the cake puffs gently around her fingers.
"How many guests?"
"Two hundred and twelve."
"Flavor?"
"What?"
"What flavor was the cake, Petunia?"
"Vanilla bean with elderflower buttercream and a lemon curd filling, but--"
"I need forty pounds of flour. Thirty pounds of butter. Sugar. Eggs. Twelve lemons. Elderflower cordial. Vanilla beans, not extract." Magnolia ticks each item off on her fingers. "And someone needs to drive to my bakery and get my rolling pins, my offset spatulas, and the big copper bowl. The one with the dent."
Petunia stares.
"I need those things in ninety minutes, Petunia."
"You can't make a five-tier wedding cake in nine hours."
Magnolia looks at me. She doesn't ask out loud. She doesn't have to.
I roll my sleeves up past my elbows.
"Tell me what to lift."
Magnolia doesn't move.
Her shoulders lock. The brief flash of command drains from her face like water through a cracked bowl, and what's left underneath is something I recognize from a hundred battlefields. The exact moment a soldier looks at the terrain and calculates, with perfect clarity, that the odds are impossible.
"I can't. Five tiers. Nine hours. Two working ovens. Two hundred and twelve people."
Petunia makes a strangled noise that suggests she's already mentally composing her social media eulogy.
"I'm a small-batch baker. I make twelve cupcakes at a time. I make rustic loaves. I make little cookies shaped like mushrooms for the farmer's market." Magnolia's fingers curl against the ash-covered counter. "I don't make five-tier wedding cakes for two hundred people in professional kitchens because I have neverbeen in a professional kitchen because my bakery is a converted garden shed with ONE OVEN that I bought secondhand from a retired gnome."
Her breathing goes shallow. Quick. Her pulse hammers visibly in the hollow of her throat. I've watched soldiers hyperventilate before a charge. Same rhythm. Same wild white-rimmed eyes.
"Mom was right. She's always right. My business is a hobby. I'm not a real baker. A real baker would--"
"Magnolia."
She doesn't hear me. She's spiraling now, her gaze fixed on the ash circle, her jaw working around words that are getting smaller and faster and more poisonous.
"--a real baker would have professional training and a commercial license and she wouldn't be standing barefoot in someone else's kitchen wearing an Orc's dress shirt--"
"Magnolia."
"--and maybe Mark was right too, maybe I'm just playing pretend, maybe--"
I cross the kitchen in three strides. My hand closes around the strap of her baking supply bag, the heavy canvas satchel she brought from the van last night and left by the pantry door. I sling it over my shoulder. The bag is dense with tools. Metal clinks against metal inside. Rolling pins. Whisks. The particular weight of implements that have been used ten thousand times.
Then I put my other hand on the small of her back.
Not gentle. Not rough. Firm. The exact pressure required to move a body that has decided it cannot move.
"Walk."
