Page 24 of The Scent of Happiness

Theo tapped the pages of the journal. “Can I borrow this? It might help—”

“Oh sure, no problem.” Brooke’s voice dripped sarcasm. She whisked the journal away from him and hugged it to herself. “And then you can ask Moses to borrow the stone tablets. I’m sure he won’t mind.”

Theo matched her tone. “I didn’t know this was a holy book.”

“I spent years perfecting these recipes, and my fragrance combinations are unique. Most soapmakers use one fragrance oil. Two, max.”

“And you use more.”

“Of course.”

“How many more?”

“Depends on what I’m making. What kind of mood I’m in.”

“You make soap according to your mood?”

She tapped her nose. “Memory, right? A happy soapmaker is going to make better soap.”

Theo pointed to the journal. “But if you’re following a standard recipe, wouldn’t it be the same, regardless?”

“I can’t explain it, but I know it’s true.” She relaxed a bit and put the journal back on the table.

If you can’t explain it, it’s probably not true. He didn’t say that to her, though. He tugged the journal toward himself. “If Dixie sues you, you’ll have to produce it for evidence anyway. Your secrets will be exposed.”

Brooke scoffed. “It’s not like that. I’m not hiding what’s in my soap, but my journal is personal.”

“Let me photocopy the relevant pages, then.”

“I’ll do it,” she said. “There’s a copier at work.”

He opened the journal again and looked at the date on the first page. “Was this your first batch? Four years ago?”

“Four and a half,” she said, her expression dreamy and far away. “That was right after I took Dixie’s class.”

Theo reared back in his chair. The front legs left the floor for a moment and came down with a thump. “Dixie taught you?”

“Yep,” Brooke said. “I mean, it wasn’t a class-class. It was at the rec center. Like a hobby thing? I was the youngest person there. I’d already been looking at books, so I knew the theory of soapmaking even if I’d never touched shea butter or smelled sodium hydroxide. But I was still pretty bad at most of it. I couldn’t figure out how to measure the oils. I poured the water into the lye instead of the other way around and it kind of bubbled up and overflowed. My soap was mushy and gray.”

“Gray?” Theo didn’t know if that was bad or good. Probably bad.

“I was trying for purple.” Brooke traced a water ring on the tabletop. “Turns out, blending colors isn’t that easy. Not like fragrance.”

“Most people would say the opposite.”

“Yes, they would,” Brooke said. “You should have heard Dixie screech when I added twice as much fragrance as the recipe called for. She tried to scold me in front of the whole class, but I’d done the calculations and I knew how much I could get away with. So I showed her.”

“I bet that went over well.”

“Not a great thing to do on the first day. It got even worse when the other students asked me for help blending fragrance oils for them. We made glorious stuff.” Brooke’s eyes shone at the memory. “One woman blended mint and lemon with a bit of ocean salt to make a mojito-on-the-beach soap. It smelled like a vacation. I helped another woman mix gingerbread, cinnamon, and apple scents and it smelled exactly like carrot cake.”

“I’m sure their soap was great, but we were talking about Dixie?”

“Right.” Brooke seemed to snap back to the present. “Dixie said I was undermining her authority and wasting ingredients. She kicked me out.”

“She could do that?” Theo was already thinking of the legal argument he could craft around that. Denial of Service, possibly Breach of Contract.

“Her class, her rules. She said I wasn’t taking it seriously, which teachers have been telling me my whole life.” Brooke shrugged and her gaze slid away. “When you have ADHD, you get used to that.”