“Okay. Well . . . okay.”

“Are you mad?” Annie asks, sounding a little panicked. “I hate it when you’re mad.”

“You hate it when anyone’s mad, Annie. That’s why you only watch rom-coms instead of murder shows.”

“That and all the murder, yes. But I mean it. Are we good?”

“Yes,” I say. “I promise I won’t tell any other news outlets that Nick and I are not in a relationship. Even though we aren’t in one and we never will be.”

Annie pauses. “I feel like a bitch. You know I don’t want you to do anything you don’t want to do, right? You know I just want you to be happy?”

“Yes, and you’re not a bitch. I love you, okay?”

“Okay,” she says, and I can practically see her nodding and biting her lip. “I love you, too.”

“I’m gonna go draw up some pie blueprints now, so I’ll talk to you later.” We say our goodbyes and hang up.

I love Annie. I really do. Our friendship is the single most stable relationship in my life, and I know that I can trust her. She’s been there for me through some of the roughest moments of my life, and we’ve been almost-roommates for years. Maybe that’s why it stings so much that she’s telling me I’m making her life harder. She literally wrote a fictionalized version of mine, and I didn’t even know about it until it was halfway to being a real movie.

I get up off the bed and pull my pie books off my cookbook shelf. Spreading them out on my tiny kitchen table, I get to work. Because if there’s one thing I know for sure, it’s that a good pie can solve most problems.

Chapter Nine

The next morning at work, the Doobies are pumping, customers are happy, and I have pie on the brain. I love retreating to dessert fantasies in stressful moments. Why think about my dad’s care when I could think about strawberry pie, covered in a thick layer of sweetened whipped cream instead? It’s so nice to let my problems melt away like chunks of butter in a baking pie crust.

This morning I made chocolate lavender muffins, which may sound unusual, but customers are really going for them (which I knew would happen, because they’re great). Lavender is one of my favorite herbs because you think it’s delicate—those tiny little flowers, the barely-there color. But if your hand slips and you put too much in, you’re going to be overwhelmed by lavender, because it’s strong. It’s assertive. It’s almost too much.

In a way, I relate to lavender.

“Tobin?” I ask as the line snakes around the counter. “Could you grab a small hot chocolate, please?”

Tobin is in his senior year at OSU and he is truly a good kid, but asking him to hand you something is asking for trouble. I don’t know how he’s worked here for years without being able to handle the concept of . . . well, handling things without dropping them. While I’m swiping a customer’s credit card and Nick is putting a muffin from the baked goods case into a paper bag, Tobin gets the hot chocolate ready. And I don’t see it happen, but I hear it: a loud and uncharacteristic yelp from Nick, followed by Tobin’s profuse apologies.