“Oh!” said Lu. “Oh. No, I’m sorry, of course I thought if I knew, you’d know. How funny.” It wasn’t funny. Lu felt sorry for Joy, Joy could see it right there on her face. Poor single Joy, couldn’t keep track of the one child she was lucky enough to have. “It’s Hugo! The boy who works at that food truck, the Roving Patisserie? I think his parents must own it. He has floppy brown hair . . . super-cute. Have you tried the salade Niçoise? It’s to die for!”

A clattering sound came from behind them and both Joy and Lu turned to look. Olivia Rossi stood there, with narrowed eyes and a hand on her hip. On the floor in front of her was a small pile of spoons that had been knocked from the counter. Olivia looked stern and disappointed, like an English nanny. Had she heard the conversation? “No backup boxes,” she said. Her expression turned sphinxlike, unknowable. “We’re completely out of stirrers,” she added. Her voice was low and even, giving nothing away.

Just then a shadow fell over the table. Joy looked up to see Maggie turn away from the table. Where had Maggie come from?

“Figures,” Maggie said. “Figures you’d do something like this. I knew I couldn’t trust you.” A flash of yellow Converse, and she was gone.

Joy and Lu sat for a moment in stunned silence. The shop door closed behind Maggie. In the back, they could hear the clattering of pans as Olivia Rossi prepped for that afternoon’s baking.

“Is she mad at me?” asked Lu finally. “Or . . .”

“Or me?” whispered Joy.

“I’m not really sure,” said Lu. “Maybe both?”

Chapter 36

ANTHONY

ANTHONY RETURNED TO Fitzy’s uncle’s cottage. For a little while he tried to comfort himself, as one does, by falling back on one of the most basic of human instincts: self-righteousness. Wasn’t Joy, after all, very attached to her dog, going so far as to brush Pickles’s teeth with a toothbrush? And at the same time didn’t she let Maggie run a little wild around the island, coming and going as she pleased, riding her bike at night, chopping with very sharp knives? And also, who did she think she was, shoveling an endless number of calories into Anthony? (Didn’t she understand that not every night had to be a dessert night?) Wasn’t she a bit unnecessarily hung up, all these years later, on the wrongs that had been done to her by her ex-husband? Did she possibly worry too much about the competition that had come to the island in the form of the Roving Patisserie, and was it possible that she talked about it a little too much? Everyone knew that whoopie pies and macarons were not the same thing.

It didn’t work. He didn’t actually believe that any of Joy’s quirks were flaws. If anything, they caused him to love her even more. He wanted to bury his face in her hair, her neck.