“Back off!” Mom snaps. “I swear if you come near my daughter—”

“What a low blow, Alice!” she accuses Mom. “You’re ruining someone’s wedding! What am I going to tell the bride?” Her angry eyes find me like a homing missile. “You came straight for the cake!”

A chorus of “yes, she did!” echoes from the other Sugar bakers.

“Lari Ramires would never!” Grandma’s friends shout back.

Mom’s face turns a deep shade of red. “Your family started that awful rumor that Salt had rats, just so you could steal the client from us!”

Dona Selma approaches us, her expression strained with worry.

“This isn’t the time for this. Please, Alice, come back into Salt.”

But Mom and Dona Eulalia start yelling at each other again. Decades of anger ricochet back and forth between the bakeries, the buildings stuck in a staring contest, backed up by two crowds of neighbors. One for Salt. One for Sugar.

“What is going on here?” a voice says, and the neighborhood—heck, the entire city—quiets.

Mom grabs my hand, her fingers cold against mine.

Seu Romário walks up the street toward us. He looks from the destroyed cake on the sidewalk to the icing covering me from head to toe.

“It’s just a little bit of cake that fell from the tray. Everything is under control,” Dona Eulalia lies, but Seu Romário isn’t even looking at her.

He’s in his late seventies, and his health is no longer what it was, but his presence is still commanding.

“Do we have any birthday cakes left?” he asks a junior baker, while the others lower their heads like most of my classmates do when they’re afraid of getting picked to answer a question at the whiteboard.

The junior baker visibly trembles.

“No, Chef,” she says.

“What do we have left from this morning?”

“We have a Souza Leão cake, a marble cake, and a passion fruit cake. They’re all small, unfortunately.”

Seu Romário frowns. “Any frosting left?”

“Some ganache, Chef.”

“Use it as frosting on the marble cake. Add a few strawberries on top. Then take all the small cakes we have left to tonight’s wedding. Grab an assortment of guava and doce de leite bolos de rolo, too, that we were going to put on display tomorrow. It’s not the same as a wedding cake, but it can’t be helped. Apologize to the bride. If she’s unsatisfied with the cake assortment, tell her we’ll give her a refund.”

At the sound of the word refund, Dona Eulalia jumps in.

“But, Father, a refund?! I didn’t want to upset you, but you need to know the truth. They should be covering the damage! They destroyed the cake on purpose!” She points a finger at Mom.

The junior bakers look from Dona Eulalia to Seu Romário.