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“No, a compliment sounds like ‘this is delicious, Lucy, thank you for making it.’ What you gave me is a performance review.”
Knox considered this. She wasn’t wrong. He’d spent his career translating feeling into analysis, converting subjective experience into data points that could be evaluated, compared, and filed. The Danish was extraordinary. Saying so felt like surrendering territory.
“It’s very good,” he said.
Lucy blinked. Then her mouth twitched, a motion so small he might have imagined it if he weren’t already watching her mouth, which he needed to stop doing.
“Was that painful for you?” she asked.
“Moderately.”
Tessa steered the conversation to logistics. She was good at this too, good at managing volatile elements without acknowledging them directly. She walked through the venue layout, the guest count, the timeline. Two hundred guests, ceremony at four, cocktail hour at five, dinner at seven. She wanted dessert stationed throughout the evening, not concentrated at the end. She wanted a statement cake as a centerpiece and smaller pastries available at every table.
“We’ll need a budget,” Tessa said, looking at Knox. “Can you put together a framework based on what Lucy proposes?”
“I’ll need her cost projections.”
“You’ll get them when I’m ready to give them,” Lucy said.
“I’ll need them before that.”
“You’ll survive.”
Knox held her gaze. She held his. Neither of them would have admitted to feeling it.
“Ronan and Devney will be the primary contacts for taste testing,” Tessa continued, redirecting the room. “Gabriel and I are handling the ceremony logistics. Knox and Lucy will coordinate on the budget and the cake and dessert program.”
Knox and Lucy, paired in a single sentence. The words landed like terms he hadn’t agreed to.
“Coordinate,” Knox said.
“Together,” Tessa clarified. “Regularly. You’ll need to meet to align on costs, quantities, and timeline.”
“I can do that over email,” Knox said.
“No,” Tessa said, with the firmness of a woman who had spent her career managing people who thought they could manage her. “In person. I need you both looking at the same samples, tasting the same flavors, making decisions in real time. This is a two-hundred-person event with a six-figure budget, and I am not having miscommunication ruin my wedding because you two can’t be in a room together.”
Knox ran the numbers in his head. Weekly meetings, minimum, from now through September. That was twenty sessions in this bakery, surrounded by the smell of butter and cinnamon and Lucy Wang’s brand of hostility, which was starting to feel less like hostility and more like something he didn’t have a category for.
He closed the thought like a spreadsheet he didn’t need.
Lucy opened her mouth to protest, and Knox could see it forming, the objection, the alternative, the argument that would allow her to maintain distance. Then she closed it and looked at Devney. Devney’s expression was neutral, which on Devney was the equivalent of a neon sign reading “I told you so.”
“Fine,” Lucy said. “We’ll meet here. My schedule, my terms.”
“Agreed,” Knox said.
“You’re a bridesmaid, aren’t you?” It wasn’t quite a question; he’d assumed it the moment he walked in, the way she and Tessa moved around each other with the shorthand of old friends.
“Tessa asked. I said no.” Lucy squared the sample plates into a line. “I’d rather make the cake. A bridesmaid holds flowers and matches the napkins. The cake is the thing two hundred people remember on the drive home, and they’ll remember it’s mine.”
The meeting continued. They discussed menu options, seasonal considerations, the merits of fondant versus buttercream. Lucy was vehemently anti-fondant. Knox filed it without understanding why it mattered. Gabriel tasted everything on the table and pronounced it all “incredible,” which made Lucy beam at him. Knox reached for his water glass and took a slow sip.
When the formal discussion ended, the group lingered. Devney pulled Lucy aside near the walk-in cooler for a conversation conducted in whispers and significant glances. Gabriel and Tessa bent over the venue floor plan, their heads close together, Tessa pointing to sight lines and traffic flow while Gabriel nodded at everything because he’d learned that arguing with Tessa about event logistics was like arguing with gravity.
Ronan sat at the table, eating a scone and reading his emotional intelligence book. Knox watched him underline a passage, then write in the margin, APPLY TO TUESDAY SITUATION. Knox didn’t ask what the Tuesday situation was. Some things were better left unexamined.
Through the pass-through window to the front, Knox could see the bakery’s morning customers filtering in. An elderly man in a flat cap ordered without speaking, and the younger employee with paint-stained sneakers knew his order by heart. A mother with a toddler balanced on one hip pointed at the muffins with the intensity of a bond trader selecting positions. The bakery moved around them all, warm and indifferent to the negotiations happening in the back room.
