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“It’s okay, Cammie,” Birdie said softly before Cam could say a word. “I’d do it all again. In a heartbeat.”

“Oh, Birdie,” Cam said, a lump knotting in her throat and tears streaming down her cheeks and spilling onto the phone. “I didn’t know, and now I feel so stupid. And ungrateful. I’m so sorry.”

“Don’t you be sorry about a thing,” Birdie said fiercely, her voice growing stronger now that she was in a familiar role—comforting her granddaughter. “Because I’m not. I’m not sorry about any of it. And your grandfather wouldn’t have been either. We both wanted the best for you. We wanted you to have all the things that if we’d given your mother, well, maybe her life would have been different. Maybe things wouldn’t have turned out… like they did. I lived with my regrets about Flora, but I wasn’t going to let the same thing happen with you. And anyway, now it’s done. And everything’s going to be just fine.”

“Wait,” Cam said, wiping her eyes with the back of her hand. “What do you mean ‘it’s done’? Did you sell already?”

“I have a buyer lined up,” Birdie said. “One of those folks who keeps leaving all those letters in the mailbox. You remember I told you about them?”

Birdie was selling to a developer? Cam could hardly process the idea. A couple years ago, after some glossy magazine had published an article calling Silver Cove one of the “sweetest small towns in the South” and another named it to its list of “Best Towns to Retire In,” the vultures had started swirling. Slick appeals were a regular appearance in the mailboxes of the beautiful old houses in town. Waterfront lots were getting snatched up, and “luxury residences” were being built a little ways out of town along the coast. They looked like shopping malls on stilts.

“Did you sign anything?” Cam asked. She had begun pacing the length of her kitchen, and Parsley eyed her warily from his favorite spot on her slip-covered wing chair.

“No, the man is coming tomorrow with the papers,” Birdie said.

Cam felt a rush of adrenaline. “Don’t sign them. Don’t sign anything!” She felt like a lawyer on one of those British crime shows she loved.

“What am I going to tell him? I already invited him over for tea!”

Cam rolled her eyes. Of course Birdie would offer up cookies and Darjeeling to the snake who was about to gobble her up. “I don’t know! Tell him anything! Tell him you’re sick.”

“Cam—” Birdie tried to protest.

“Just put him off. Birdie, I swear to you, I’m going to make this right. Just give me a chance. Please.”

“Okay, sweetie,” Birdie relented.

That was Birdie, Cam thought, the tears welling up again. She was still willing to give her granddaughter anything she wanted, even though that instinct was the very thing that had gotten her into this situation in the first place.

Cam looked around her little apartment. Suddenly, everything looked different than it had only a few minutes before. All of her lovely things—the antique mirror by the door, the little pewter Eiffel Tower she had picked up at a tourist stall by the Seine—seemed to mock her. Everything she had, everything she was—it was all because of Birdie’s sacrifice. Cam knew she couldn’t live here, like this, not with Birdie crammed into one of those sad apartments while some developer turned her beloved home into a McMansion.

“What are you going to do?” Birdie asked.

“I have no idea,” Cam said. She forced herself to sound confident. For Birdie. Maybe for herself. “But I’ll think of something.”

CHAPTER THREE

Cam stepped off the elevators at Biblio Literary Agency, admiring as she always did the blond wood floors and the sleek, floor-to-ceiling bookshelves displaying all of their authors’ works, the covers facing out. Cam’s eyes landed immediately on Meredith’s cookbooks with their titles in large font superimposed over photos of her. Her first book, Simple Pleasures, shows Meredith standing in her cottage-chic Berkshires kitchen, a platter of tiny radishes alongside a hunk of creamy butter in her outstretched hands. Market to Table with Meredith, her latest, shows Meredith with a French market bag parked on the soapstone counter beside her, a colorful frittata bursting with summer vegetables on the other side. Cam had spent a lot of time at Sergio’s developing that recipe.

She took note of where on Biblio’s shelves the books were displayed: almost at eye level and off to the side—not too shabby. Their placement was probably a good proxy for how much money they were bringing into the agency relative to those by the other authors it represented. The real prime real estate on the shelves was occupied by the big guns—the New York Times bestsellers, the ones with splashy write-ups in People magazine, and the ones with the Oprah seal or a Reese Witherspoon recommendation. At least Meredith wasn’t in Siberia.

When Cam had emailed Russell to tell him that she was hand-delivering the pages to his office in midtown Manhattan in addition to emailing them, he had sounded pleasantly surprised—or at least, if he wasn’t, he certainly did a good job of pretending otherwise. And when he offered to take her to lunch and she instead said she would bring the meal to his office, he’d been even more pleased.

“Hi, Cam!” the receptionist greeted her. “So great to see you.”

Cam doubted the woman, who looked like an MFA student who moonlit as a fashion model, could have picked her out of a police lineup, but she was apparently good at her job—which meant making even the agency’s little fish feel like something other than the anchovies they were. Cam had taken extra care in getting dressed, but upgrading the T-shirt in her usual uniform of jeans and ballerina flats to a cream blouse and camel blazer didn’t even put her in the same universe as the woman behind the desk, who would have looked at home on a designer runway. Cam’s palms felt a little sweaty.

“Go in. Russell’s waiting for you,” she said, motioning down a hallway with a perfectly manicured hand. Cam doubted that. Russell Paxton didn’t wait for anything, at least not the way most people thought of waiting. He was a man in perpetual motion. In fact, Cam figured he had probably fired off two texts to clients and instructed his personal assistant to make dinner reservations in the time it took her to walk from the receptionist’s desk to his door.

As Cam approached, she paused. She could hear Russell’s raised voice behind the slab of blond wood. Was he yelling? Was that something banging on his desk? She had never known Russell to lose his temper. She waited a moment until everything was quiet and then rapped softly.

If something was wrong, Russell wasn’t letting on. As he opened the door, he smiled and landed twin kisses on her cheeks in rapid succession. “‘Meredith McAllister’s instructions are always spot-on,’” he said a tad dramatically, reciting from memory a line from a blurb that had appeared the previous week on Food & Wine’s website naming the year’s best cookbooks. “‘She’ll guide even the most inexperienced home cook to a culinary home run with flavors sophisticated enough to impress your foodie friends.’”

Cam waved her hand. “It was just a little, tiny write-up,” she demurred.

“No such thing,” he replied. “And besides, that’s the kind of quality in a recipe book that is so rare. Plenty of people can make a crazy-delicious dish themselves, but very few people can explain to a reader exactly how to re-create the magic. That’s your secret sauce!”

“Speaking of secret sauce”—Cam unzipped the insulated bag she had been carrying and pulled out a container of the chicken and rhubarb dish—“wait until you taste Meredith’s latest. It’s from the chapter I’m submitting today.”