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“Make yourself comfortable,” I said to our visitor, gesturing half-heartedly at the rickety folding chairs I kept expecting to collapse under us when we sat for the occasional break.

I returned a few minutes later with a pot of tea in one hand and the “Highland coo” cookies I’d spent all night decorating in the other. Mac was giving Edna a quick tour of the renovations we’d already accomplished and regaling her with the story of how fast everything was coming together.

It was arguably going a lot faster than we’d expected. Refreshing the whitewashing on the bricks had been a breeze, and when we’d arrived to give the hardwood flooring a second coat of wax, we’d realized that the one coat was more than enough to give it a nice gleam. Other than a long punch list of small repairs and touch-ups, all that was left to do was clean the windows and decide what furniture I would need.

As Mac finished giving our unexpected visitor the grand tour, I dropped tea bags into pretty little mismatched china teacups that I’d found hidden under a throw in an unlikely basket while scouring the local charity shops for furniture. My heart swelled with love and gratitude as I listened to him rave about the shop and how amazing he knew it would be. I was going to miss him so much when he left.

“Exquisite!” Edna exclaimed, polishing off two cookies before the tea was even done steeping. “The texture is spot-on, the artistry masterful, and the taste! Perfection. If you do decide to open a tea shop, you absolutely must sell these,” the eccentric woman proclaimed, her eyes shining with mischief as she eyed the rest of the cookies in the box.

I handed it to her so she could help herself.

“As lovely as a tea shop sounds, I don’t know the first thing about tea, and as I keep telling my brother here, cookies are not a feasible business venture. I would completely burn myself out trying to bake and decorate enough cookies every day to keep from starving.”

Although… I hadn’t considered pairing cookies with something else.

“Pish posh,” Edna said, interrupting my train of thought and waving away my concerns with the hand not holding the remains of her cookie. “You could charge the earth for these. With my connections and your talents, anything is possible!” She paused, and added, almost as an afterthought, “Have I perhaps forgotten to mention that I write a food column for the paper? It’s not much, but I’m confident that a well-worded review from me would do wonders for your little tea shop.” She arched a perfectly tweezed eyebrow at me and smiled sweetly before lifting her teacup, her little pinkie delicately arched.

Mac’s eyes nearly bugged out of his head when he caught my gaze. I couldn’t tell if he was biting back laughter or excited about what Edna had just said.

My palms grew slightly damp. Cookies on their own weren’t a viable business venture, especially not in a seasonal tourist town. But a tea shop that happened to also sell cookies? My heart thumped once hard in response.

I could almost picture the tea shop she kept describing. More important, I could see myself in it. Maybe not in the frilly pink apron I’d imagined myself wearing in the bakery I’d dreamed of as a child, but sitting in this slightly magical place made even the most impossible thing seem plausible. And the more we talked about it, the less improbable it seemed.

“A tea shop?” I asked Mac, cutting into their conversation.

As much as Mac loved to kid around, he always knew when I needed him to be serious. He cocked his head to the side and looked thoughtfully over at me, thinking my question over before replying.

“It’s not what you pictured when we were kids.”

“No,” I agreed.

“And, as you said, you don’t know the first thing about tea.”

I nodded, my budding excitement shriveling as I followed his logic.

“But…” He stopped and looked around the little shop. “It could work. You could hire someone to do the tea or take a crash course or two. And it wouldn’t even matter if the tea was terrible because the cookies would more than make up for it.”

Edna chuckled. “It’s very hard to make a bad cup of tea.”

“And,” Mac added excitedly, “you could sell custom cookies to earn a little extra when needed.”

His suggestion pierced the image forming in my head, bursting it as effectively as a needle popping a balloon.

“How am I supposed to do all that and run a tea shop?” I groaned, exasperation washing over me. “Bake all night and sell all day? I wouldn’t last a week!”

Mac reached over to ruffle my hair the way he always had when I was a child on the verge of a temper tantrum, usually one that he had triggered.

“Silly Meggy,” he said. “You would hire help.”

“Fantastic,” I replied, throwing my hands in the air. “So now I’m not the only one who’ll go hungry. My help and I will both starve because we can’t sell enough cookies to live on. That sounds like a great plan.”

Edna tutted, waving an admonishing finger at me. “Words have power, child. Whether you say you’ll succeed or say you’ll fail, you’ll be right.”

I bit back my next complaint just in case she happened to be correct.

We sipped our tea in silence as I worried the problem in my head. I could maybe close the shop Sundays and bake then. Or Mondays, since we lived in a tourist town that was probably hopping on the weekend. If I set aside one day just for baking, I could freeze or at least refrigerate the plain ones and decorate them based on demand. And if the designs were simple enough, I could potentially teach someone to make them and lessen my own workload. Then I’d have time to work in the tea shop itself, which, now that I was thinking about it, was something I really, really wanted to do.

“Do you think it could actually work?” I asked Mac, needing him to be the big brother who always tried to poke holes in my plans to make sure they were airtight so I wouldn’t humiliate myself.