I broke first, slamming my laptop screen closed and forcing down a swig of scorching hot coffee. ‘An article spouting a pack of lies. What’s new?’
I stared down at my desk until Rory went back over to his. What the hell was going on lately? I took my jacket off, suddenly warm.
‘I wonder what lover boy is going to think about this.’ Rory was swinging his house keys around his finger, swivelling on his chair.
I scoffed. ‘What is Maisy going to say about this?’
That shut him up. I took it as confirmation that neither of us wanted this article falling into the wrong hands.
15
‘Penny!’
I hadn’t even pushed on the door before Mum spotted me, drowning out the sound of the little bell overhead. Fondant & Flour was usually almost empty following the mid-morning and lunch rushes, which made it the perfect time to take a late lunch and visit Mum.
Angela was leaning on the counter, flipping through a magazine.
‘Come join us.’ Mum’s glace cherry nipples were the first thing I noticed as she beckoned me over. ‘You were just the person I wanted to walk through that door.’
I was instantly suspicious. She typically put her blinkers on once she got in the zone. Joe had come in once for cookies and she hadn’t clocked who it was until he’d handed over his card.
‘Happy to see you too –’ I barely had the chance to finish my sentence before she threw me an apron and produced a piping bag from underneath the counter. Ah. There we go.
‘And here I was, thinking that you were just thrilled to see me.’ I gave Angela a half hug as I shrugged the apron on. She was currently sporting a lilac ‘lob’ that I hadn’t seen before. Angela had been in a midlife crisis as long as I’d known her. ‘What have you two been gossiping about?’
I’d witnessed my mum with her friends and a bottle of sauvignon blanc enough times to know when she was having a full-on debrief. My mother had the most vibrant social life of all of us; if she wasn’t at her weekly bridge tournament, she was at book club. And if she wasn’t there, she was round at Angela’s.
‘Always thrilled to see you. But even more thrilled to have an extra pair of hands. Especially when my assistant baker called in sick this morning. I need you to pipe cream into these butterfly cakes. Go wash your hands first.’
She didn’t wait for confirmation that I could give up my time to pipe some cakes. Things must have been desperate if she was asking me to step in; I was usually relegated to back-office administration or taking the bins out. Baking had never come easily to me, no matter how many times she’d propped me up on the kitchen counter with a mixing bowl. All her efforts had produced was a 7-year-old girl who was addicted to licking the spoon.
‘I have a job, you know.’
Angela squinted up at me, her reading glasses on the table next to her. ‘What’s the point in being a CEO if you can’t take an afternoon off?’
‘To Penny, an afternoon off is a fate worse than death.’ Mum passed me over a cup of tea. She wasn’t wrong, per se, but that was just because there was always something Level-related to be done. Or so I told myself.
‘Fine, fine. You have me for an extended lunch, but that’s it!’
Why did I constantly feel like I had to prove people wrong lately? I fired off a text to Rory letting him know I’d be taking a little longer than expected. He sent back a GIF of someone collapsing from shock, which I deliberately ignored.
‘Where do you want me?’ I washed my hands and tied my hair up, grateful at least to have a menial task to occupy my mind. Today was Friday, the day of my third date with Isaac. Or, the supposed day of our third date. I still hadn’t heard from him, not since Saturday afternoon. I had however, heard from my own stupid app, churning out a meet-cute even though we hadn’t spoken in days. It had popped up on my phone last night whilst I was scrolling in bed:
Congratulations! Next level unlocked: You and Isaac would have met at a wine bar in Shoreditch.
Which was two dates too late, and only succeeded in rubbing salt in the wound. I wasn’t going to need that meet-cute now. Even Maeve had conceded that it wasn’t looking good at this point. My cheeks flamed at the thought of everyone knowing I’d been ghosted.
‘Make sure you pipe the first centimetre or so onto baking paper.’ Mum watched over my shoulder, close enough that I could see the light sheen of sweat on her upper lip. ‘The initial pipe is never the best.’
‘If you’re going to trust me, trust me. I can pipe some icing onto a cake.’ I waited for her to back down. She did.
‘That’s rich coming from the girl who gave me five rounds of “amends” when I baked her birthday cake last year. And also, it’s buttercream, not icing.’
When Mum felt like it, she gave as good as she got.
I turned, feeling bad for snapping. ‘Sorry. Bad day.’ I considered it. ‘Bad week, actually.’
I wasn’t actually sure which aspect of my week had been worse; the fact that I was almost definitely getting ghosted, or the fact that loads of people on the internet were conspiring about my love affair with my best friend. Everyone in the office was still riding on the hilarity, but I was over it. Even if it had caused our downloads to shoot up. And I was probably being paranoid, but I could have sworn that Rory was avoiding me. He’d been hanging out in the main office a lot, pulling up a chair to work with Dexter or having meetings with Ella in her office rather than ours. And he’d been going on lunchtime walks to the sandwich shop that was almost twenty minutes away. No one did that for fun.
‘That looks good.’ Mum gestured to the buttercream I was piping in each vanilla sponge. ‘So, tell us what’s bothering you.’
This wasn’t the first time that I’d come to the bakery for advice; usually on my way home from work when she was just closing up. It was the adult version of sitting at the kitchen island after school, nibbling away at my lip until she prodded me to let it out. Before I could second-guess myself, it all came spilling out. The dating challenge, Isaac, Link trying to muscle in.
‘Oh, honey.’ Mum signalled for Angela to rub my back, her own hands stuck in a ball of dough. ‘You put so much pressure on yourself.’
Angela nudged my tea towards me. ‘Trust us, finding a partner is not the be-all and end-all. Seriously.’
Angela had been divorced three times. Neither of the women in front of me had time for men right now.
‘It’s not that I even want one’ – every time I closed my eyes and imagined losing three nights of my week to a stranger, I shuddered – ‘but what if there’s something wrong with me that means I can’t get one?’
Mum started laughing, and then immediately stopped when she noticed that I was blinking back tears. ‘Well, for starters, Pen, we can’t say for sure that something hasn’t happened to Isaac. He might be dead in a ditch.’
Angela stepped in. ‘Probably not dead in a ditch.’
I wasn’t a monster. I was almost definitely sure I would rather be ghosted by Isaac, than for him to be lying in a ditch somewhere. Almost definitely sure. ‘I should never have agreed to download the stupid app in the first place.’
I saw them exchange a look before Mum stepped in. ‘Honey, the app isn’t stupid. It’s men.’
