Cilla and Gaz exchanged a look, and then he popped up and rubbed his hands together. “I think I smell those Cornish pasties I put in the oven!” he chirped. “Nick, do you want a squizz at my pastry work?”

“I’m at thirteen,” Nick said.

“Thirteen guest books?” Freddie said, genuinely shocked.

“Am I to take it that I win this one, too?” Nick asked. “Do you need to count books of condolence?”

“Congratulations. You’re both heroes. Now knock it off,” I snapped.

“This is a stupid conversation anyway,” Freddie grumbled, flopping back onto the sofa.

“It’s little wonder I’ve chosen to make my life with a woman,” Bea said. “We don’t need to measure anything and then overcompensate.”

She swept out of the room. Then we heard her stop and curse as she briefly forgot which way the kitchen was. Our laughter broke the tension.

“I apologize,” Nick said to the rest of us. “We should not have made you sit through that when Gaz’s pastry work is in the offing.”

“No harm done, but let’s move on in there and give him the rave reviews he so desperately desires,” Cilla said as we all scooped up our cocktails.

Freddie sidled up to me. “I’m sorry, too, Bex,” he said. “We got carried away.”

“Thanks, Fred, but I’ve got this,” Nick said, and slung an arm around my shoulders.

“Aye, aye, captain.” Freddie saluted sarcastically before heading toward dinner.

“Don’t make the damn apology a competition, too,” I hissed at Nick, pushing his arm off. “I am over you two trying to outdo each other like we’re in some kind of stupid Royal Usefulness Pageant or something.”

“But I look so dashing in a sash,” Nick teased.

“No. Don’t you do that twinkly thing,” I said. “Go. I’ll be there in a second.”

Lacey and I watched him walk off, and then she shook her head slowly.

“They’re never going to work this out themselves, are they?” I asked. It was a rhetorical question. “Eleanor was right. It is going to come down to me.”

In truth, I’d trusted that once I got the boys talking again, their natural pull—those years of being each other’s constant—would take over and do the rest. But I’d been fooling myself. We were deep in some insidious psychological muck. It was unfair to make me be the one to start digging us out of it when they were fully capable of picking up a shovel, but I’d underestimated how stubborn two grown men could be.

Lacey walked over and entwined her arm with mine. “Happy birthday, Bex,” she said. “For once, I’m glad I’m not in your shoes.”

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN