by Laura Briggs
“Cost price, though,” said Tessa. “You’re selling yourself short, Natalie. That dress made Molly look amazing. And I know it took courage for you to show it to anybody.”
“Maybe a little courage,” said Natalie. “I can think of worse sacrifices than selling someone a dress that’s been in storage for a year.” She hid her smile as she gathered up two more catalogs to peruse with their client.
It had taken more courage than Natalie was admitting; they both knew. After all the snide comments Kandace had made, it couldn’t have been easy to show her work to a customer as picky as Bianca—especially a dress that was anything but the princess’s ball gown Paolo’s grandmother had pictured.
Tessa squeezed Natalie’s arm as she passed her in the doorway. “I’m proud of you, just so you know.”
“Call it the first brave step to my future as a designer,” said Natalie. “Now if I can only find a matching veil and some hair ornaments to crown Molly, then my part in this deal will be fulfilled.”
“Believe me, it already is,” said Tessa.
Natalie rolled her eyes. “Whatever,” she said. The little gleam of pleasure in response to this praise was buried deep in Natalie’s eyes, but it was still there if someone looked closely.
“Who wants to talk veils?” asked Natalie, holding up a catalog as she entered her office again. “Tiaras, head garlands, simple clip ornaments—we have lots of options to explore, ladies.”
“Coming,” promised Molly, who couldn’t get enough of her reflection in this dress, like a girl trying on her first formal. Bianca was still smiling as brightly as if her future granddaughter-in-law were wearing a Versace gown and not an obscure designer’s concept.
Natalie’s phone buzzed. On the screen was a text from Cal: Miss u more every day. Kandace’s latest dress STINKS btw!! He sent a picture of a sketched baggy garment embellished with mini gauzy Tinker Bell wings hanging off its shoulders.
Even while basking in her success, Natalie couldn’t help recoiling a little from the image on her screen. There was no doubt about it: Kandace’s latest line was definitely destined for the store’s bargain rack.
Twenty-Four
The flowers for the wedding were simple and affordable, but beautiful. Rosies and Posies had created a bouquet of lavender shades and soft greens for Molly, featuring lots of roses as well. There were no bridesmaids, so the only other flowers were to decorate the two big urns on either side of the courtyard tree, and two centerpieces for the buffet table.
“If the courtyard meets with their approval,” Natalie pointed out, as they made a list of extra supplies for decorating the chosen venues. “They haven’t seen it yet. And I definitely sensed skepticism in Bianca’s voice when you told her you found an outdoor spot that would be perfect.”
“We’ll see,” said Tessa. “But in the meantime, I want to be prepared. The two big arrangements can be used at the church instead if that’s the venue of choice. And if we get a really nice garland we can decorate an arbor for them to stand underneath during the outdoor ceremony… or we can use it to decorate the church altar instead.”
“How good a deal will this florist give you?” Ama asked, as she checked her oven’s timer. She had a dessert order for a bar mitzvah to finish: a set of shortbread cookies in the shape of the popular cartoon characters from Transformers.
“Really good, thanks to my cousin Gabby,” Natalie answered. “She got her manager at the flower shop to give us a ‘friends and family’ discount. And its owner Maxine promised she would hold some extra lavender roses and baby’s breath in case we need something more,” she said.
Tessa checked her to-do list again. “Nat’s already taken care of the permits for the restaurant, of course, since Paolo and Molly both approved it—”
“—and the cake is a ‘go,’ of course,” said Ama. “But I’m not sure about my tiramisu. I think I need a second and third opinion.”
“Do you have samples?” asked Natalie.
“Of course.” Ama produced three little glass bowls from the fridge. Each contained layers of whiskey-vanilla infused ladyfingers with a sweet coffee syrup and a mellow mint cream. Both Natalie and Tessa tasted it.
“Not bad,” said Natalie. “I like it. It’s different from my mom’s tiramisu… it’s kind of like a trifle, actually.”
“Would chocolate on top be too much?” asked Tessa—receiving a resounding “yes” from both her partners.
“I’m thinking of switching to the Irish macaroons instead of this,” said Ama, opening her notebook. “Oh, and did I tell you about the cool Norwegian wedding cake?” she said. “It’s tradition there to serve these flat bread layers, sandwiching them with sweet cheese, cream, and syrup, then cutting them into squares.” She showed them a photo in a cookbook called Traditional Norwegian Recipes.
“They kind of look like tortillas,” said Natalie, wrinkling her nose as she read the recipe. “The cake itself sounds kind of bland. I mean, slathered in flour and griddled?”
“It’s to make it perfectly white,” explained Ama. “It was part of the tradition, when white flour was a luxury. But what if we changed the recipe to make them a little lighter, more like a crepe, for instance, and then layered them in stacks with the traditional ingredients? We could serve them in little clear bowls so you could see the layers.”
“I like it,” said Tessa. “Can you make it work?”
“I think so,” said Ama. “So if we have that, the cookies, the macaroons, the sugared almonds and the wedding cake, maybe the tiramisu—” Here, a sudden spout of smoke from the oven cut Ama’s list short.
“My bar mitzvah cookies!” She threw open the door as a blue flash emerged. Acrid smoke filled the room and the three of them coughed loudly. The shrill tweeee! of the smoke alarm followed.
“What happened?” said Natalie between hacking coughs.
“I don’t know,” Ama said, gasping for breath. “I had it set to the right temperature—”
Blake appeared in the room. “What happened?” he demanded, echoing Natalie’s words.
“I don’t know—cookies in oven—” Coughing smothered the rest of Ama’s statement as she poked at the oven’s interior with a spatula, trying to rescue her baking tray.
Blake pulled a flashlight from his belt and peered inside the oven. “The element’s burned out,” he said. “It must’ve had too many miles on it already.” He fanned some smoke away with a towel, then reached up to lift the smoke detector from above the stove and end its persistent tweeee.
“What do we do?” asked Tessa. She avoided Blake’s glance as she spoke, since she hadn’t quite gotten over the sting of their last conversation. His assessment of her career—and her personal character—was anything but flattering. If it weren’t for the fact that burned-out elements sounded fatal to an oven’s operation, she wouldn’t be consulting him at all.
“You’ll have to get a new one and install it,” said Blake, as he reset the alarm. “Until then, your oven is out of commission. Meaning no cakes, cookies, or anything else.”
“That’s not really an option for us,” Tessa replied, feeling a little bit peeved at his casual attitude. “I know our work may seem frivolous to you,” she added, remembering his words the other night, “all flash and glitz—but I’m afraid it’s necessary to keep our clients happy.”
“What are you doing?” Natalie hissed. “We need his help to fix it.”
But Tessa did not relent. “If you’re too busy, I’m sure we can find someone else to repair it. But if you happen to have the time between more important projects, we would appreciate the help.” She crossed her arms with this defiant speech.
For a moment, the handyman seemed speechless. Then, he turned to Natalie and said, “I’ll have to look up the model number. Until then—”
“We’ll make do,” Tessa finished, fanning the smoke toward an open window with a copy of Ama’s cookie recipe. With what? mouthed Natalie, although Tessa ignored her. The handyman nodded, then pop
ped the smoke detector back in place and left without another word.
“Way to go,” snapped Natalie. “You want to tell us why you just sabotaged our chances of getting our oven up and running again?”
“He wasn’t taking it seriously,” Tessa said with a shrug. “He would probably drag his feet on doing it, since it’s not vital to the building.”
“Well, I hope someone takes it seriously,” said Ama, scraping her burned cookies into the trash can. “I can’t make appetizers for fifty people without an oven. The one at my family’s restaurant isn’t an option, really, unless I want to bake Molly and Paolo’s wedding food in the middle of the night.” A little note of panic crept into her voice.
“Same for the bakery,” Natalie said. “You want to wrestle my Uncle Guido for kitchen privileges? I can tell you now that you’ll lose.”
“We’ll get this one repaired in time,” Tessa said, less sure of this now that the reality was sinking in. Perhaps she was a little short tempered with the handyman—but he could have been nicer about her job, too. Maybe she could smooth it over.
But she didn’t see Blake again for the rest of the day. His absence hovered in the back of her mind, growing from a slight annoyance to something more like worry. He obviously had errands to run, or something. No reason to google “oven repair” and try to locate and install the missing element herself, as if she had ever done more than tighten the screw on a door handle. No reason to think she had another crisis of conscience on her hands with just days left until the wedding was scheduled to take place.
No reason at all.
Twenty-Five
The noise was a shuffling sound, followed by a thump. Tessa rolled over on her side in the summer’s heat, sweltering beneath the cotton sheet. Another noise. She chalked it up to her neighbor who worked the late shift at a warehouse, until her sleepy brain remembered that she had no neighbors anymore.
She bolted upright. Her gaze fell on the clock on her bedside drawers. Two thirty-three. From downstairs came another thump, and the low whine of scraping metal. Tessa’s heart pounded.
Creeping from beneath the sheet, she pulled on her robe and seized her phone from the dresser. Should she call the police? Tell them there was a break-in and to hurry, possibly bringing a SWAT team? Lock her door, and the door to the neighboring room, and the one that led to the adjacent powder room—for heaven’s sake, didn’t any room in this place have total privacy?
She took a deep breath. It was the pipes, maybe. They could be thumping, because the plumbing was bad, right? Or the fridge might be having one of its noisy fits during a cooling cycle. She was imagining things because she was alone late at night in a huge, creaky old building.
She shivered and pulled her robe closed. Her door was open, creaking slightly as she poked her head into the hall outside. Nobody was there, and the doors to her partners’ offices were closed, as were those of the washroom and the empty rooms still in need of work. She felt the worn carpet cushion her feet as she crept toward the stairs, arming herself as a precaution with a heavy decorative curtain rod that was awaiting a pair of gauze drapes in her private apartment.
Please don’t creak, she begged the spiral staircase. Its steps were warm beneath her feet, and silent until she reached the midsection, where the whole unit swayed a little due to some kind of warping in its structure—Tessa had forgotten the exact words the contractor used when trying to explain it. She waited for it to settle, heart hammering again, before she took another step.
Relax. Nobody was listening. There was nobody here, just because she imagined it. Probably it was a dream, the way you dream about people calling your name just when you’re dropping off to sleep. Or somebody had slammed a car door on the street beneath her window—that was a good explanation.
The latest thud from downstairs was unmistakable. Tessa jumped, and the curtain rod fell to the floor below, where its impact was muffled by one of Ama’s geometric area rugs. Tessa’s shaking hand scooped it up again as she crouched in the shadows, one shaking finger trying to dial the emergency number on her phone. Unless the refrigerator had fallen over on its own, that noise had been made by a human.
Still crouching, she inched toward the front door, and that was when she noticed a light from the kitchen. The thief turned on a light? That seemed counterintuitive in the world of stealthy criminals. Plus, what were they doing robbing that room in the house? Nothing of value was in there, unless they wanted to steal Tessa’s old toaster with its one working slot. But if Ama left her industrial mixer here—
Fear of creaking floorboards should have stopped her, but Tessa was now creeping toward the kitchen door, standing ajar. Her hand tightened around the curtain rod. There was a siren function on her phone, and a recording of savage guard dogs barking, and either one of those might send a thief running—especially one who’d discovered there was nothing available but canisters of flour and sugar.
The thief was in the oven. Literally. It was the reason Tessa lost her senses entirely and pushed the door open in disbelief, at almost the same time the upper half of her intruder emerged from its mouth. He started at the sight of her, dropping his screwdriver as the shriek escaped Tessa’s lips, the curtain rod clattering to the floor a second time as she swiftly closed her robe around her short satin nightgown.
“Mr. Ellingham?!” she demanded, in shock and embarrassment.
“I’m sorry!” he said. He averted his gaze, face red with embarrassment. “I didn’t know anybody was here… it’s two in the morning—”
“I know it’s two in the morning,” she snapped. “What are you doing here, sneaking around our building in the dead of night?”
“What are you doing here?” he countered.
“I live here,” she retorted, then repented of this a second later. “That is—I’ve been spending some nights… staying here for a period while I finish some… some things.” She gazed loftily at the ceiling, trying to sound casual about this explanation.
“You live here?” he said. He sounded surprised, and a little skeptical. “Where?”
“Upstairs,” she said shortly. “There’s plenty of room.” Not that it was any of his business where she lived or what she did. This was her building, after all.
“This place is a death trap as it is, but it must be a hundred degrees up there,” he said. “You must be living in an oven.” Tessa became aware that her hair was sticking to the layer of perspiration on her face, and that her robe was clinging to her as well. It was a thin robe made of filmy lavender silk, which is why she pulled it more closely around herself now, to hide the view of her short nightgown. Why couldn’t she have had a premonition about this incident and slept in nice baggy pajamas despite the heat?
“Anyway, what are you doing here?” she repeated.
“Your partner Ama gave me a key,” he said. “I… uh… had a late pickup outside the city, and I was in the neighborhood… so I stopped by to finish something, because I need to start on those cabinets tomorrow…”
“And you left your screwdriver in our oven?” said Tessa. Blake’s story petered out at this point. Tessa saw a metal grate lying on the floor a few feet away, scorched and charred on the outside. There were black stains on Blake’s hands too, and a newly opened manufacturer’s plastic sleeve lay crumpled to one side.
“You were fixing our oven, weren’t you?” she said. Blake looked evasive.
“Look, I… I happened to have a spare one handy,” he said. “It was the same model, so I thought I would let you have it. It happened to be in the back of my truck too—by sheer coincidence, I assure you.”
Surprise filled Tessa completely. “You shouldn’t do it for free,” she said. “We’ll pay you. We were going to hire you to do it.”
“You hadn’t asked me,” he said. His tone was slightly gentler. “I thought I would do it as a tiny favor, no strings attached.” He picked up his screwdriver and closed the oven door.
Obviously, he hadn’t been driving around wit
h a spare oven element that just happened to fit their appliance, and they both knew it. If she weren’t so embarrassed that they were practically accepting charity from the contractor—Blake’s pity manifesting itself in his secret midnight repairs—then she would be desperately thinking of the right words to thank him. Instead, she studied her toes rather than looking into his eyes; maybe because he seemed so embarrassed for getting caught in the act. Because he didn’t want the thanks or the credit—or because he knew how embarrassing it was for her and her partners?
“We’ll still pay you,” she said.
“Whatever you want.” He put his tools back in their metal box. “But it was fifteen minutes of my time. I’ve spent more time brushing my teeth before. But if you insist…”
A tiny smile crossed Tessa’s lips, and she dared to steal a glance in Blake’s direction. “You really don’t have to feel sorry for us,” she said. “For a new business, I think we happen to be doing fairly well in terms of coping with our limits. Other than the little maneuver involving you,” she amended quickly. “But other than that, we have things perfectly under control.”
“You living here, therefore—”
“—is purely business strategy,” said Tessa. “I’m consolidating my expenses and maximizing my capital’s investment. The other partners are doing the same thing… in their own way.” Natalie quitting her job at Kandace’s hadn’t been helpful the first few weeks, but it also couldn’t be helped, given Kandace’s nature.
He snapped closed his toolbox. “So what happened to the partner I’m pretending to be?” he asked. “He decided to streamline his capital for a different purpose?”
“Stefan was more of a… figurehead,” Tessa replied vaguely. “I’m sure he would have invested some money. Probably.” She hesitated. “His contribution was more about bringing a certain image or—or panache—to the business.”