“Making a cake,” I replied. I measured out a tablespoon of vanilla as Mom walked over to the bowl, taking in the assembled ingredients. “Hummingbird cake? Fancy. Who’s the lucky recipient?”

“Miss Saylor.” Reaching in one of the drawers, I pulled out the biggest spoon I could find.

Mom gave me a careful look. She knew what hummingbird cake meant. “And what did you do that requires a ‘sorry I screwed up’ cake?”

I was already lucky the school hadn’t called Mom and told her about me skipping class, so I decided to keep it as simple as possible. “David and I had a thing the other day.”

Mom heaved a sigh. “Harper . . .”

“We weren’t fighting,” I quickly added, earning me a snort of laughter.

“That’s a first, then.”

“We had a disagreement, that’s all. Miss Saylor saw us, and I thought a cake would smooth things over a little bit.” Which it would, hopefully. And it would give me a good excuse to go tell David about the connection I’d made between Paladins and Oracles.

With a rueful smile, Mom walked over to the fridge and pulled out the eggs and sugar for me. “Well, in that case, let me help. You’re a good baker, but you’re not the best one in this family.”

Mom cracked the eggs in a separate bowl while I lifted two bananas out of the fruit basket on the counter. We fell into a comfortable silence as she whisked and I mashed. And then, when I leaned over to scrape the bananas into her eggs and sugar mixture, Mom gave a little chuckle. “Do you remember how bad Leigh-Anne was at baking?”

I watched her out of the corner of my eye as I started to stir. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to talk about my sister, but I never knew how it would go. Sometimes, Mom could look at pictures of her and tell stories, and it was fine. We’d smile or laugh, and then move on to some other topic.

Other times, her voice would get tight, and her lip would tremble, and then the tears would come. And even though I knew it was awful of me, when she got like that, all I wanted to do was run away. To ignore it.

But there were no tears in Mom’s voice now. “Yeah,” I said carefully. “The baking soda brownies.”

Mom’s chuckle turned into a real laugh. “Yes! Oh God, I knew I should’ve tasted them before we started wrapping them up for the bake sale.”

Now I smiled, too. “Yeah, but even though they were terrible, Leigh-Anne sold all of them, remember? Said they were special ‘vitamin brownies’ and that’s why they tasted so bad.”

“And then you told her she shouldn’t lie at a church bake sale,” Mom added, holding the mixing bowl as I dumped the wet ingredients into the dry.