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Art met me at the top of the stairs.

“You forgot Merry’s snack,” I repeated, holding out the bar.

“I forgot my snack too,” he replied, sliding his right hand behind my head and his left around my body to pull me in for a kiss that made my toes curl.

My head was still spinning when he bounded back down the stairs after Merry, and it wasn’t until he was out of sight that I realized I was still holding the granola bar.

The delivery man wheeled the last of the cases into the shop and backed out of the door with a jaunty wave and a “good luck” as he vanished with his dolly. I stared at the tower of boxes, dread pooling in my stomach. Why had I not considered how many boxes it would take to ship forty large candy jars?

“Viv?” I called up to the back room. “Are you busy?”

I got no response to my question, not that I was really expecting one. Whether that was because her headphones were in her ears or she was willfully ignoring me, I wasn’t sure I wanted to know.

She’d been more or less pretending that I didn’t exist all day, which I completely understood. At her age, it would have taken me a while to adjust to living in a new country with a total stranger who also happened to be in a relationship with her father. It was a lot to process.

Groaning, I hoisted a box onto the counter and sliced it open. The first jar was even lovelier than I’d hoped, and a little thrill of excitement ran through me as the dirty glass caught a little of the morning light. It was pretty empty and dusty. Shiny and filled with colorful teas, it would be breathtaking. Just as soon as I found the time to research what tea to sell and where to source it.

Despite all the cleaning, fixing, organizing, and sourcing furniture and equipment, the list of things I still had to do before I could open seemed to somehow get longer rather than shorter.

Some of the issues stemmed from lack of experience, but a significant number of things I still had to get done were pending because I had only two hands and one head, and all of me required at least six hours of sleep every night.

Well, that and a chronic disposition against asking for help if I could avoid it.

Peggy had overheard me venting to Shona about everything I needed to get done and had rolled up her sleeves and gotten to work. If I’d ever doubted the existence of fairy godmothers, she’d blown my skepticism right out the door with one snap of her fingers and a few timely phone calls.

The first thing she’d done was find an old sweet shop closing down a few towns over whose owner was retiring and was thrilled to sell me a few things at cost. In two shakes of a lamb’s tail, he’d handed off his industrial mixer and scale, two small stacking commercial convection ovens, a countertop blast chiller, a stack of drool-worthy giant cookie sheets and spatulas, as well as the antique glass jars that had just been delivered, which he’d used to display candy. In one fell swoop, I’d scored most of what I needed for the kitchen and the main shop displays for a fraction of the cost of getting everything new, and for far less than it would have cost me to rent a professional kitchen. As if that hadn’t been enough, once I’d explained what I’d be selling in the shop, he’d thrown in tons of equipment and tools I hadn’t even considered. If I ever finished everything on my list, the first thing I was doing was teaching myself to temper chocolate.

Then, when I’d mentioned that I was worried it wouldn’t all fit in the shop kitchen, Peggy had tsked, shaken her head, and fired up her phone again.

While the electrician—her neighbor’s son’s best friend——she’d sent my way ripped out the wiring in the shop kitchen to get it up to code for a commercial kitchen, she had a contractor—her nephew on Nial’s sister’s side—take measurements for the new counters and workspace they both assured me would be more than sufficient to meet my needs.

“Quick as ye like,” as Peggy put it, I had a working commercial kitchen painted in a cheery yellow with white trim that somehow held all the secondhand sweet-shop appliances and equipment, with just enough space left over for me to stand or sit at the counter to work. Peggy assured me that no magic had been involved, but I wasn’t convinced.

The sweet scent of citrus tickled my nose when I pried open the first jar—subtle, but probably strong enough to mess with tea flavors. Hopefully a good wipe down would take care of any lingering candy smells. I plugged in my own headphones, found something fun to listen to, and got to work.

A light tap on my shoulder as I was opening the tenth box startled me enough to send my box cutter flying across the room. Viv rolled her eyes when I spun around and said something I couldn’t hear over the pounding strains of Kelly Clarkson celebrating finally being able to breathe. I plucked my headphones out of my ears.

“Sorry, I couldn’t hear you,” I said, blushing when she glanced down at the music still pouring out of my earbuds and rolled her eyes even harder. “Did you need something?” I asked, after she just stared at me stonily for a long moment.

“You’re doing it wrong,” she deadpanned, not taking her eyes off my face, arms crossed defensively.

“Doing what wrong?” I asked, quickly running through what I’d been doing. Had I been dancing to the music without realizing it and getting the choreography wrong?

“This is super inefficient,” she replied, gesturing to the jars lined up on the counter and the many boxes still waiting to be opened.

I frowned. It hadn’t even occurred to me that there might be another way to do it.

“How would you do it?” I asked, genuinely curious.

“Line them all up, spray everything down, wipe them all at the same time. Then you dry them all at once instead of one by one. Saves time.”

I tilted my head. “That might work. Want to help me? Or do you have to work?”

She rolled her eyes again instead of replying and stomped over to where the box cutter had landed. We worked side by side for a moment, unboxing jars. Two were cracked beyond repair, but the other thirty-eight were intact and beautiful.

“Don’t you, like, have some music or something?” she said after we’d been working for a few minutes, the silence growing more awkward by the second. “Something less millennial-lame than what you were listening to? It’s, like, painfully quiet in here.”

Deciding that a multi-Grammy winner didn’t need me defending her music, I ignored the snarky jab.