The vacuum turned off and the cleaning crew inspected the floor to make sure all the glass was gone. Tatiana looked remorseful enough as she apologized, but some firm legal-sounding instructions were recited to her.

“Okay, everyone, back to your challenges. We’ve reset the clock. You get thirty minutes from now,” Jonah announced, and the digital timer on the monitor started up. “Make it count.”

Every sign of anything but stubborn purpose vanished from Ashna’s face. “Let’s go,” she said, as though none of what had just happened had happened. As though this weren’t the second time she had flipped that switch like someone who was two entirely different people. Neither of whom Rico recognized.

She snapped her fingers in front of his face. “You have thirty . . . twenty-nine minutes to make churros.” She ran to the overstocked pantry and started pointing at things as she rattled off ingredients.

Whiplash, she was giving him whiplash. He filled his arms. Flour, eggs, cinnamon, brown sugar, confectioners’ sugar, condensed milk.

“I haven’t made churros since culinary school. We’re going to have to wing it.”

He followed her back to their workstation, lost and winded from her mercurial shifts. “Your memory seems just fine.” Obviously, they both remembered more than they wanted to. “I’m sure you’ll remember the recipe.”

For the barest second she stiffened. Then she pulled a napkin from a stack, dabbed the sweat off her forehead, and started to throw out instructions.

“Break four eggs into the mixing bowl and beat them.”

Breaking eggs was exactly what Rico needed, and beating the heck out of something sounded great. “Yes, ma’am.”

He turned the handmixer on and started beating the eggs, the sound was loud enough to keep their conversation private. “Want to tell me what that was about?” he hissed, even as his face stayed genial for the camera.

“Not now. You’ll overbeat the eggs,” she hissed back, refusing to meet his eyes.

He raised the speed, and the noise level. “Not turning it off until you tell me.”

She twisted the napkin in her hand, but she knew him too well to argue. “It feels like an unfair advantage. I don’t like it.” She pointed at the eggs. “That’s enough.”

He turned off the beater.

“Now the water. Two cups. Bring them to a boil.”

He measured water into a pan and put it on the stove without slamming it like he wanted to. They fumed silently as they waited, fake smiles plastered across their faces.

“Now add the sugar.”

“Really? This . . .” He stirred the sugar, then spun the spoon around to encompass her swings from panic to self-possession and then back again, over and over. “This is you”—he clanged the spoon on the pan drowning the rest of his words—“feeling guilty?”

She nodded, indignant as a liar. “Flour. Two cups. Sift it in.”