Which was why today—on what would have been her birthday—Leo had decided he would try to make them himself.

He knew his family could use a little magic, after all. His father hadn’t been sleeping well. Leo often found him standing at the kitchen sink or sitting in his office chair, staring off into space. And Gareth had been so moody lately, lashing out, storming off, shutting himself in his room. Leo wanted to help them. He didn’t know if there were any magic words that would make them hurt any less, so a mammoth blueberry muffin modeled after Grace Fender’s own epic creation would have to suffice.

A charred blueberry rock, on the other hand, would probably only make things worse.

“Great job, Leo,” he whispered to himself. “Freaking fantastic.”

He had to hide the evidence. Best-case scenario, Gareth would only tease Leo about the fail, and his father would probably scold him for leaving something in the oven too long. Worst-case: the sight of Leo’s catastrophe would remind them only of how much they’d lost.

He grabbed a fork and pried the first muffin loose. He was about to dump it in the trash when a voice stopped him.

“What do we have here?”

Dr. Calvin Fender stood in the entry, gray fleece blanket around his shoulders like a cape, mug in hand. “I smelled smoke,” he said.

“It’s nothing. An accident,” Leo said. “Forget it.”

“An accident,” his father echoed. He came to stand beside Leo, inspecting the burned muffin. The man smelled like coffee and day-old sweat. “Accidents happen,” he said. “And they aren’t always a bad thing. Penicillin was an accident. Röntgen’s X-rays. The Chinese were actually looking for the secret to everlasting life when they discovered gunpowder. Ironic, that one.” Leo saw his dad’s eyes dart toward the fruit-stained bowl in the sink. “Blueberries?”

“From the garden,” Leo said quietly.

His father nodded. “You have your mother’s green thumb,” he said thoughtfully. “One of many gifts she gave you. Go get the butter from the fridge, will you?”

Leo did as he was commanded—he always did as he was commanded when it came to his father—returning to see his dad wielding a knife, carefully paring the burned top from the muffin Leo had been seconds from tossing.

“Rumor has it that the tremendous energy potential of EL-four eight six was discovered by accident. Even the Aykari sometimes stumble upon their fortunes. And Dr. Ventasi didn’t know what he was looking for when he found it here on Earth, either. He just figured if he dug deep enough he would find something. . . .”

Leo’s father finished his dissection, removing the blackened top. Underneath was something precious: rich white cake riddled with blobs of blue. Little ribbons of steam drifted up from the muffin’s fluffy heart.

“Eureka!” Dr. Fender said. “Grab a spoon.”

Leo grabbed two, returning to see his father had scalped a second muffin, revealing its berry-laden unburned guts. His father scraped a scrim of butter from the dish and spread it on the exposed insides of the muffin, then dug in with his spoon, scooping out the warm middle. “‘They are ill discoverers that think there is no land when they can see nothing but sea.’ Turns out we didn’t have to dig that deep after all.” He took a bite and smiled.