She needed to get a grip, Olivia told herself crossly. She was not the type of person to feel sorry for herself, not even for a moment, and in any case, there was nothing to feel sorry about. She had a job she loved, a nice home, a loving mum, plenty of friends, even this ridiculous cat. She didn’t need anything. She was really quite sure of that.

She stroked Dr Jekyll again, a little too firmly this time, and with a resentful yowl he dug his claws in—ouch—and then lumbered off her lap, plopping onto the floor before stalking away, bushy tail raised high in dudgeon. Perhaps she wouldn’t count the cat among her blessings quite yet, but still. She was happy; she was fulfilled. It was just everyone felt a little out of sorts, a bit restless, once in a while, didn’t they? Of course they did.

The next morning Olivia was up bright and early to make her next batch of cupcakes. Last night, after turning off a trashy show about discontented and overly Botoxed housewives in some American city or other, she’d designed a banner for the shop window detailing the Twelve Days of Cupcakes, complete with a border of holly leaves and bright red berries, and pictures of various delicious cupcakes. She’d also made a card that customers could have stamped whenever they bought a cupcake; in a moment of determined optimism she’d printed a hundred of them. Her Art GCSE was being put to some small use, at least.

Now, in the inky darkness of pre-dawn, she reached for sacks of flour and sugar, a basket of eggs delivered fresh from a local farm three times a week. Even though her body ached with tiredness and her eyes felt gritty, she loved these moments in the little kitchen in the back of the tea shop, creating the concoctions that would fill the cake stand and display case that day. Baking was love; it was what her mother had done all her life, what she’d taught.

They hadn’t had much when Olivia had been growing up; her father had walked out when she was two years old, never to come back, and Tina had held a variety of menial jobs to make ends meet. There hadn’t been the money for extravagant holidays or new trainers or birthday parties, but there had always, always been cake—and biscuits and tarts and pies and meringues. Her mother splurged on sugar and flour, high-quality cooking chocolate and plenty of hundreds and thousands. And just about every day when Olivia had come home from school, there had been something delicious and still-warm on the kitchen table.

Tina had passed that love of baking on to Olivia; even when she’d been doing the nine-to-five (or really, eight-to-six) slog in London, she’d loved relaxing with a big bowl of butter and sugar to cream together. She’d always brought in tins of cakes and flapjacks, biscuits and tarts, to the office, happy for anyone to help themselves. And when a friend was down, a baby was born, anything to celebrate or mourn—well, baking always helped.