“Listen to yourself.” With Amelie asleep upstairs, Rosaline couldn’t quite shout and didn’t quite want to. “You’ve just said you wanted to make sure I could have anything. Why can’t I have this?”
“Because . . . because it’s what my mother had and what everybody I went to school with had and what I had to fight my whole life not to have. And I swore that would never happen to you, and now”—Cordelia covered her eyes with a hand—“it’s like you’re throwing it back in my face.”
“Oh, Mum.” Rosaline put two badly made mugs of Earl Grey down on the kitchen table and slumped down into one of the chairs. She didn’t remember her grandparents on that side very well—just vague recollections of a perfect house, a slight, diminished woman, and a man in an armchair shouting “Mary, where’s my tea?” “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to make you feel . . . face-thrown. It’s . . . I’m not you. We want different things, and it should be okay that we want different things. Because . . . because . . . ” Rosaline sucked in a breath so fast and deep it almost made her dizzy. “I’m so proud of you. You are literally brilliant and I’m lucky to have this brilliant, world-renowned, slightly absentee mother who’s always stood up for what she believes in.”
Cordelia was crying now in an open, ugly, very real kind of way.
“I don’t want you to be anyone other than who you are,” Rosaline told her. “I just need you to let me be who I am.”
Rosaline went to retrieve a box of tissues so Cordelia could dry her eyes. Then they finished their tea in a silence filled with ambiguities.
“I’m going to try, darling,” said Cordelia at last. “I really am going to try.”
It wasn’t exactly the fatted calf, but it would do. It was more than Rosaline had ever expected. “Thank you.”
“Your father . . . your father is going to need some time.”
“Fine with me.”
Cordelia gazed at her half-imploringly. “You mustn’t . . . He’s a good man. He’s just . . . ”
“I know.”
“He was the first person I ever knew who took me seriously. It’s hard not to fall in love with someone who gives you that.”
Rosaline liked to think she was an adult with a nuanced view of the world. But it still fucked with her head to realise her parents were human beings. People with flaws and histories and vulnerabilities and baggage. And some day, Amelie was going to have to learn the same thing about her.
And hopefully, if Rosaline hadn’t made a complete hash of everything, still find a way to love her afterwards.
Saturday
SO THIS WAS IT. Well, half of it. Rosaline gazed round the oddly empty ballroom, marvelling that she was now, officially, one of the best bakers in the country, if you didn’t count all the people who’d won previous seasons and everyone who was good enough to do it for actual money. Nora seemed about as relaxed as she usually did—and whether her secret was age and experience, wisdom and apathy, or a steady diet of books about Greek billionaires, Rosaline really hoped she could get in on it one day. By contrast, Alain looked ever so slightly like death. From the bags under his eyes, he’d either been studying his recipes or unable to sleep, and it felt bad to feel good about that. But not so bad that she didn’t. After all, he’d been a complete cock to her.
The cameras circled them, catching their various expressions of pre-final anticipation, and then the doors opened with a touch more ceremony than they usually did, admitting Grace Forsythe and the judges.
“Welcome, my trio of talented tartlets,” announced Grace Forsythe, “to the finale of Bake Expectations. You’ve proved both your worth and your bread, and while the other contestants have snapped like brandy or crumbled like rhubarb, you’re standing before us today like a display of artisanal grissini, tall and proud and faintly knobbly. But there can be only one winner, and the first step in this final stage of the competition is our most challenging blind bake yet.”
A pause to gather reaction shots of them, well, reacting. Rosaline gamely gave her best terrified face, which, honestly, involved very little acting.
“Your first grand final challenge,” Grace Forsythe continued, making Rosaline wonder how many times they’d mention that it was the final, “is a traditional confection found all over the Spanish-speaking world, first introduced to the Iberian Peninsula in the eighth century. We’d like you to make fifty, yes fifty, identical, delicious alfajores. You have two hours, starting on three. Three, darlings.”
Rosaline took a deep breath and looked at the first step in the instructions: “Make dulce de leche.” Which was, on the one hand, good because she’d made it before. And, on the other hand, bad because she’d stood over a pan of it in this very ballroom, crying because she was ballsing it up.
Time, then, for a dulce-de reckoning. Because she was damned if she was going to be defeated by a milky pudding sauce.
Well . . . not twice anyway.
It was strange waiting for the judging when it was just the three of them—Alain, who was still looking shattered and sullen, went off for a walk; and Nora sat under a tree, contentedly reading The Scandalous Spanish Magnate’s Pregnant Mistress.
“Well,” Rosaline said to Colin Thrimp and his camera operator, “I wasn’t crying so I think that went better than last time.”
And as it turned out, she was right. In fact, she’d sort of smashed it, claiming the win, which made her feel great, except for the tiny detail that it was a lot easier to do a good job at something you’d already practised loads.
“I thought I did well, considering,” remarked Alain pensively in his post-judging interview, “given that I’ve not made dulce de leche since before the competition started.”
There were sufficiently few of them left that they couldn’t not eat lunch together—which made for an awkward dining experience.
“Are you enjoying your book?” Alain asked Nora in what Rosaline now recognised as his “secretly mocking you” tone.
She shrugged. “Well, you know. There’s a secret baby and a sexy Spaniard, what more can you want?”
“Literary merit, perhaps?” offered Alain.
Nora gave him a withering stare. “One of the best things about being seventy-three is that you can read whatever you like.”
“The last thing I read all the way through”—Rosaline made a game attempt to smooth things over—“was a book for nine- to twelve-year-olds about a young witch who discovers last Tuesday is missing.”
“How about you, Alain?”
Rosaline would not have trusted either the edge in Nora’s voice or the look in her eyes, but Alain apparently had no qualms. “Lincoln in the Bardo.”
“And what happens in the end?” asked Nora, in the same voice, with the same look.
“Plot,” returned Alain, “in the conventional sense is not the point of the novel.”
“You haven’t finished it, have you?”
“In case you haven’t noticed, I’m in the final of a televised baking competition. I’ve had other things to do.”