She pulled out her phone and opened her Skype app. Her sister’s profile was greyed out—offline. In Louisa’s safe, distant world, it was a little before dawn. A twinge of guilt tickled her gut as she pressed the small profile icon and began the long-distance call.
It rang out. A small pop-up asked if she would like to leave a message. Abigail declined and called again.
This time Louisa answered on the third ring.
‘Abby?’ Her voice was warped with recent sleep, and then Sam’s voice spoke over hers, ripe with concern and disorientation. ‘What’s going on?’
‘It’s Abby,’ Louisa said, then there was a scrape of sound as she shifted in the sheets. ‘I don’t know. Abby, what going on? What’s wrong?’
‘Nothing’s wrong,’ Abigail said, automatically reassuring. Insanely guilty about waking the no doubt sleep-deprived new parents.
‘Nothing’s wrong?’ Louisa repeated. It sounded like the fog was clearing from her mind. Her next words were sharper. ‘Of course something’s wrong. Out with it.’
Abigail pressed her fingers to her temple. Her breath was a cloud of steam in the frigid air. She watched the dim screen brighten as Louisa turned on a light, then the picture wobbled as she pushed herself up in bed. When it stilled, Louisa’s expression was worried and impatient.
There was no soft way to announce that she was in an abusive relationship, so Abigail didn’t try to sugar coat it. ‘Mal attacked me. Repeatedly. I’m scared, and I—’ Her throat tightened, cutting her off. She swallowed with difficulty. ‘I feel trapped.’
She heard Sam’s curse, then the sound of him moving in bed. His face appeared on the screen beside Louisa’s just as Louisa’s face hardened with rage.
‘What do you mean “trapped”?’ Louisa said. ‘Where are you?’
Instant, unshakable belief. What a wonder it was. Abigail’s fractured, battered heart seemed to smile.
‘At work.’
‘Get in your car, and drive straight to the police station. Do not go back home.’
The wind changed direction and for a moment there was a ghostly wail of fast-moving air within a small place. The wind changed again and the noise abated.
‘It’s not that simple.’
Haltingly, Abigail told her long-distance family about everything that had happened since things had soured at the engagement party. Louisa had needed a moment to collect herself after she’d learned of their mother’s part, and it had taken Abigail several attempts to detail those dark days in the house, but when everyone was caught up, they found themselves in a curious limbo between speechlessness and stuttering outrage. A long minute elapsed as everyone processed the news.
Louisa was the first to break the thoughtful quiet. ‘What do you want to do next?’
‘Leave,’ Abigail said without hesitation. ‘Start a new life. There’s nothing and no-one here for me. I want to go to London but Mal’s …’ She thought of him towering over her, declaring with a twisted, cruel mouth, that he’d never let her go. ‘I don’t know how I’m going to shake him.’
‘You can come here,’ Sam said. He checked Louisa’s reaction before continuing. ‘Live with us until things blow over.’ Louisa was nodding.
‘I don’t want to come to Australia,’ Abigail said. She smiled tiredly. ‘But thank you for the offer.’
‘We’d pay for the flights,’ Sam pushed. ‘We’d pay for everything.’
She declined again. There was something about fleeing the country that felt villainous, as if she were in the wrong. And she wanted to leave Mal, not her whole world. The UK was her home. Her heart was in this place, if no longer in another person.
‘But money,’ Louisa said, grasping onto the new theme, ‘would solve a lot of your problems. How much would you need to get yourself set up in London?’
‘I … don’t know.’
‘Get back to us. And don’t be cheap. Round up every possible expense. But that aside, you need a way to leave without that bastard wanting to follow you. And I think I have an idea.’
Abigail watched her, and was so still in herself that her blood might have stopped flowing to listen too. The plan uncurled, raw and with much room to improve, but staggering in its manipulation. It was bold and stupendously crazy, but if it worked, Mal would wipe his hands of her publicly, and therefore irrevocably.
Chapter 24
The best for the worst
Abigail woke at three o’clock, and for a long moment didn’t know where she was. Her heart thumped and her pulse skittered, and her body ached from an irregular night’s sleep. There was a soft light from the Yard street lights coming through the door leading to the shopfront. She got her bearings, unzipped her sleeping bag and rolled off the mattress.
There was no shower this morning, only a splash of water on her face and a reapplication of make-up and deodorant.
She turned the ovens on, unpacked the refrigerated ingredients onto the counter, then packed away all evidence of her night in the kitchen. Brittany would be mortified, and neither of them had time for that kind of reaction today.
She sifted, folded, whisked and blended, then when she had enough batter for two hundred cupcakes, poured it into the waiting tins. She set a timer, mixed the four colours she’d need for Isobelle’s ombre engagement cake, and sent a silent prayer towards the ceiling that everything would go well today.
Boucake needed this. Abigail needed this. If the order was flawless, she wouldn’t hear from the bride-to-be and her groom again. They would have no cause for complaint, and if sanity prevailed, they wouldn’t reach out to her to cater for their wedding. The answer would be no anyway. She wouldn’t be this stupid twice. Following this, Abigail could slip back into her comfortable anonymity. Maybe get a private number separate from the business, should anyone—ever—wish to call her for something non-business related.
It could happen. Dillon had happened. Lightning could strike twice.
She pulled the wrapped five-layer cake out from the cool room and set it on her favourite turntable, then turned the camera on and positioned herself anonymously in the shot. With a spatula, she transferred the first colour onto the lowest quarter of the bride-white icing, then with three more spatulas, scraped three more colours onto the cake. She set all four bowls aside then retrieved a long, flat-edge scraper and pressed it flush against the side of the cake. As one well-practiced hand turned the spinning table, the other held the tool steady. Irregular blobs of colour slid under the blade and were transformed into a smooth, striking gradation of yellow to white.
Abigail didn’t smooth the top—the fruit that would crown it was coming fresh from the market, and would arrive when Brittany did. She set it aside and threw herself into the next task.
She piled silk ribbon into vases, then applied stickers. Over a hundred of them on the bottoms of cooled cupcakes. Then it was time for the blossoms. Yellow rose after yellow rose. Dozens upon dozens, each similar but different. Some more open than others. All given her best effort, because this would be her worst client.
She stopped only long enough to get the promised breakfast. Gregor was bright-eyed and cheerful when she bustled across the Yard, and he got started on her coffee order before she’d even finished rattling it off. He was delighted when she gave him two fresh cupcakes—one for him and one for his wife. He ate his immediately and made such a show of enjoying it that she laughed. He talked about the weather, tsked about her early starts and wild eyes, then released her to rush back across the space with two brown bags packed full of pastries and two large coffees. She told herself she would repay his generosity in kind tomorrow morning.
Brittany arrived at 7.30 am, both arms loaded with overstuffed re-usable bags. She found a spare square of space on one of the counters and unloaded everything; deep red raspberries and plump strawberries, purple grapes, blueberries and blackberries.
‘I had to elbow an old lady out of the way for these strawberries,’ Brittany said, looking around. ‘She saw I had my ey
e on this particular punnet and wouldn’t you know it, her creaky old body seemed to lose every hint of arthritis. Is that coffee?’ She hurried over to the take-away cups and closed her hands around the warm sides.
Abigail finished the rose she was working on, buried the stem into the foam holder, then stood. She washed and dried the fruit as Brittany settled in, then carried everything over to the layer cake and began painstakingly arranging the various shapes and colours into an appetising miniature mountain atop of it.
When Brittany had finished her chocolate croissant, she took up Abigail’s piping bag and began making roses. Together they were a short production line. When the cake was complete and returned to the cool room, they sat side-by-side and worked quickly but carefully to create hundreds more of the pale-yellow flowers. Brittany tired of the silence quickly. She brought her phone over to the workbench and turned some music on, and everything seemed to go faster with Beyoncé’s encouragement.
At nine o’clock, Brittany opened the shopfront and welcomed their first customers of the day. Abigail stayed out the back, but switched from creating to arranging. One raw bouquet. Two.
Once Brittany had an example to work to, she began replicating it, and soon enough they were working on their eleventh, and final bouquet.
When all the roses were affixed, they returned to the earliest bouquets and began piping leaves beneath the bottom-most cupcakes to obscure the spot where the bouquet balanced on the tall vase. Brittany added silver cachous with long-handled tweezers. Abigail draped lengths of imitation pearls between the petals and leaves using a similar long-handled tool, then sprayed an edible gloss over the completed bouquets to make them shine.
She stood back and regarded them all.
They were striking, romantic things. Full of Abigail’s personality and skill, made almost alive by the different energy Brittany seemed to infuse into her work. Isobelle would not find fault with them.
Abigail checked the time.
‘Half an hour,’ she noted.
Brittany’s shoulders drew together and her forehead dropped closer to the final bouquet.
Abigail pulled on a pair of gloves, stepped into the cool room and dragged a container of dry ice packets out of the freezer. The camera saw her face at last when she walked behind the line of boxes, slipping packets into the in-built recesses.
Abigail and Brittany lifted the bouquets into the boxes together, slowly and fluidly, with the kind of care Isobelle could not find fault with either. They closed the lids, Abigail positioned the ribbons, and Brittany applied the Boucake wax seal. They left the cake and one of the centrepieces unsecured, then it was all over, with nine minutes to spare.
The doorbell tinkled.
Brittany pressed the back of her arm to her forehead. ‘Am I sweating? I feel like I’m sweating.’
‘You’re not sweating, but you’re coming into some money.’
Brittany rolled her head to the side to look at her. Adrenaline seemed to be leaving her body like water through a cracked fish tank. ‘Say what?’
‘I’m giving you a bonus,’ Abigail said tiredly. ‘None of this would have been possible without you.’
Brittany held up a fist, and Abigail obligingly bumped it.
The customer turned out to be Isobelle, unapologetically early and so excited she seemed lit from within. She’d had her typically gravity-straight hair swept up into voluminous, regal twists, and her make-up professionally done so that her eyes were exaggerated and her cheekbones highlighted.
She looked beautiful. Ready for a party.
‘We stayed in the city overnight,’ she said, touching her hair. ‘And we hired a van. The van you suggested.’
The smile that had been curling Abigail’s lips arrested.
‘I’m sorry,’ Isobelle said, touching her collarbone next. ‘I meant hello. Hello.’ She inclined her head as if manners often slipped her mind. ‘Are they ready?’ She glanced around the shop. ‘Can I see them?’
Brittany, who’d stepped out with Abigail and was yet to be acknowledged, glanced at Abigail’s rigid expression. ‘Uh—they’re ready—’ she looked at Isobelle, ‘—and we can certainly show you one of the centrepieces and the cake. The others have been sealed.’
We, Abigail thought.
Isobelle didn’t seem to know how to react to the good and bad news. Her face twitched. ‘They’re sealed? But how do I know if they’re what I want?’
‘They’re exactly what you want,’ Brittany said, adopting a voice that was both enthusiastic and placating. ‘It’s a quality control thing for us. All of the centrepieces are near identical, the one we’ll show you is—’
‘Is probably the best looking of the lot of them.’ The accusation in her eyes was directed at Abigail. ‘I want to see them all before they leave this shop.’
Abigail made herself a fraction taller. ‘That’s fine, we’ll open them. But we won’t rewrap them. That would compromise the longevity of the dry ice, but if your party is in the next few hours that shouldn’t matter too much. Especially if you keep the van aircon on.’
Isobelle opened her painted mouth to counter, but the bell interrupted her.
A second, infinitely more unwelcome customer strode into the store.
His face was still too angular to be handsome. His hair, longer than Abigail had ever seen it before, curled over his ears and disguised the height of his forehead. It suited him, as did the plum-coloured shirt and tie. For her benefit, she knew. To intimidate. To dangle. His formal dress made him look successful, even at this time on a Saturday, and he was wearing the cologne she’d bought him two Christmases ago, the one she’d told him made her want to rip his clothes off.
Mal moved to stand by his fiancée, and his wide-mouthed smile was all teeth and no warmth.
Abigail reached for the counter and held on.
‘Brittany,’ she said without turning to the woman, ‘get the camera. Now. Record this.’
A cruel, capricious fire shone out from his eyes.
Brittany glanced between them, then hurried from the room.
‘So this is the rock you’ve been hiding under,’ Mal said, dropping an arm over Isobelle’s shoulders.
Abigail noted the way the woman sagged under the sudden weight of him, and righted herself without him noticing.
She said nothing.
‘I’ve got to tell you, Abby, this is all very … humble.’ A lick of flame. One step closer. ‘It looks good on you.’
His left foot didn’t follow his right foot. Brittany had reappeared, the camera held up to her face. He scowled at her and Abigail felt a twist of sudden adrenaline. She threw kindling at him, dragging his fiery attention back towards herself.
‘Your order is ready. We’ll bring the boxes through to the shop door and then Boucake takes no responsibility beyond—’
‘She won’t let me see them,’ Isobelle said, turning her face towards Mal’s as if he were the sun; as if the sight of him didn’t burn, but warm.
Mal raised a single eyebrow. ‘That sounds very unprofessional.’
Abigail spoke through the rattle in her heart. ‘Ten of the twelve boxes are sealed, two are unsealed and can be—’
‘No,’ he said, dropping his arm from Isobelle’s shoulders, ‘we see them all. This way?’ He pointed to the kitchen door, and was crossing the shop floor before Abigail could voice her protest.
‘The kitchen’s for staff only,’ Brittany said, standing her ground in the doorway.
Mal reached for her, and Abigail’s entire body seemed to compress. Her hands flew up, words built and broke in her throat. They toppled from her mouth in a jumble as she threw herself towards Brittany.
Mal shoved her and Brittany crashed bodily into the doorjamb.
‘What the fuck?’ she cried. She righted herself before Abigail could reach her, and whirled the camera around to follow their intruder. ‘A, call the police!’
Abigail looked back at Isobelle.
The woman’s lips were
parted in wordless surprise. Her hand was halfway between her hip and her mouth, almost comically suspended. When she became aware of her audience she reanimated. Chin up, chest out, she made to follow her fiancé into the kitchen.
Abigail pivoted on her heel and followed Brittany inside.
Mal was prowling before the long bench, regarding the beautifully presented boxes with suspicion and purpose.
‘Just stop,’ Abigail said. She was pleased how sharp her voice sounded. ‘I’ll open them. Stand back and I’ll open them.’
Mal spotted a pile of washed utensils on the drying rack, pushed his fingers amongst them, and withdrew a gleaming chef’s knife. He turned back to Abigail and waved the blade slowly between them. ‘You don’t think you’ve done enough?’ Another flash of teeth. ‘I suggest you take your own advice and stand back.’
He brought the blade down, too fast to control, too forcefully to arrest. It cleaved through the wax seal on the first box and hit the countertop with a scream. He cut them all. Rapidly. Gleefully. And he revelled in his audience.
Brittany lifted one hand from the camera and pushed the other into her pocket. She withdrew her phone—looked away from Mal only long enough to unlock the screen and find a number, then she dialled. Mal ignored her. He threw the knife onto the ground so forcefully it skidded under the nearest bench, then he threw each lid back, one after the other, like a production. Within the boxes, the centrepieces wobbled.
‘Oh, they’re beautiful!’ Isobelle cooed at the exact moment that Brittany murmured, ‘Please help us,’ into her phone.
Have Your Cake Page 23