Chapter 2

For two hours I’ve been torturing myself. While designing a rough draft of the cake I’m now making for the love of my life’s wedding to a woman who isn’t me, I’ve been going over mine and Nash’s last night together, wondering how I’d managed to get it all so wrong. I thought we were going to get back together. The only reason we broke up in the first place was because of the distance. I couldn’t leave Graceville, not when Momma was sick, and especially not after she passed away. I had so much to do here; everything had fallen into my hands. So I was stuck here, and Nash was in New York City at college.

We both agreed that the distance between us was too difficult and we broke up, but it was never really final. We continued to see one another. We continued to talk almost every day. We even continued to share ‘I love you’ texts before bed. Of course I’d thought we were going to get back together, eventually. Nash and I were meant to be together. So, I surprised him by flying up to New York at the last minute on New Year’s Eve. The flights cost me more than I could afford, but I just had to be there with him. He couldn’t get home for the holidays because he was scheduled at the hospital. And when I’d spoken to him over the phone he sounded so sad, so forlorn. I made it my mission to be there with him.

And he’d been so surprised to see me, but there was something else, as if he was actually relieved that I was there. We spent the night in Times Square with a million other revelers, drinking cheap wine, freezing our butts off in the snow while waiting for the ball to drop. And, when it did, when the clock struck midnight, when the fireworks started to explode from the sky, Nash turned to me. He grabbed my face with his gloved hands, steadying me with a look that took every ounce of my breath away, and despite the deafening sound of a million people singing along to ‘Auld Lang Syne’, I heard every ounce of yearning in his words when he told me he missed me, kissing me in a way he’d never kissed me before.

I look down at the design I’ve sketched, and I shake my head, scrunching the paper into a ball and tossing it in the direction of the trash can. With a heavy sigh, I look around me, at the place I’ve called home my entire life. Momma’s bakery was always my safe space, the one place I could come and feel as if everything in life was good, no matter how far from good things truly were. But now, it suddenly feels like my prison, the one place that’s kept me trapped here, the reason I’m not the woman marrying Nash.

I need to get the hell out of here before I completely lose it and drown my sorrows in what’s left of today’s cream cakes in the display cabinet. My already rounded hips are relying on what little self-control I have. I need to go home, have a long, hot bath, and lose myself in a cringeworthy Netflix series and the box of Girl Scout cookies I keep stashed away for times of crisis, like this. But, just as I finish locking up the store and turn to my car parked out front, my eyes zero in on the flashing neon ‘End Zone’ sign across the road, and I’m like a moth to a flame; I don’t even remember so much as crossing the street and, yet, here I am pushing my way through the saloon doors like I own the damn place.