Beautiful Broken Things(Beautiful Broken Things #1)(25)

This was so clearly meant to be a joke that I laughed out loud, but I was the only one who did. Rosie looked confused and Sarah exasperated.

‘You are a piece of work,’ Sarah said, taking the purse from Suzanne and putting it into her bag. She sounded like she couldn’t decide whether to be annoyed or amused.

‘Caddy thinks I’m funny,’ Suzanne replied. She flashed a grin at me.

‘Caddy doesn’t have to live with you,’ Sarah said, but she was smiling now.

‘Neither do youuuu,’ Suzanne sang.

Throughout this exchange, which ended with Sarah draping a tea towel over Suzanne’s head, Rosie alternated between looking from me to them with the same confused expression on her face. She would later ask me if I thought it was normal to joke about such horrible topics, a question that had never occurred to me. There was no ‘normal’, just Suzanne, who was spiky and self-deprecating and sardonic. It made sense to me that she dealt with her heartaches by making light of them, any time it was possible to do so. And really, what was the alternative?

By the time Sarah finally left – ‘Please don’t burn the house down!’ – it had started to get dark. Suzanne turned the kitchen light on and then flipped open the laptop that had been left on the counter.

‘Music?’ she asked, tapping a few keys.

‘Oh my God,’ Rosie said in response. She was peering at the recipe for the macarons, her eyes widening with each step. ‘I thought we were going to bake something easy! Can’t we just make brownies?’

‘But music.’ Suzanne pointed at the laptop. ‘Music first.’

‘We have to whisk egg whites.’ Rosie said to me, pointing. ‘And pipe stuff.’

‘It’s really easy,’ Suzanne promised. ‘Is it OK if I play the Lucksmiths?’

‘Who?’ Rosie and I said at the same time.

‘I’ll take that as a yes.’ The music started, bouncy and cheerful. ‘OK, so . . . what’s the first step, Roz?’

Rosie looked at her, her eyes narrowing. ‘Haven’t you made these before?’

‘Nope,’ Suzanne said cheerfully.

‘Suze!’ Rosie practically wailed.

‘What? They’re really easy, honest. Sarah said so, and I’ve watched her make them.’

‘Let’s make brownies,’ Rosie said decisively, shutting the recipe book.

A flash of annoyance passed over Suzanne’s face. She reached over and opened the book again, flipping through it to get to the right page. ‘We’re making macarons.’ She pointed to the ingredients laid out across the table. ‘I got everything ready.’

Rosie let out a huffing noise. ‘Why does it have to be macarons? If we make brownies, we know they’ll turn out good.’

They looked at each other, belligerent. I reached out and took the recipe book, sliding it towards me to see the first step. ‘Egg whites and caster sugar in a bowl,’ I read out in my firmest voice. ‘Four egg whites, seventy grams of sugar.’ I opened the box of eggs. ‘How do you just get the white bit?’

Suzanne laughed, her face relaxing. ‘You have to separate them.’

Rosie still looked mutinous, now with a side of betrayed. I avoided her gaze, opening the bag of sugar and weighing out seventy grams.

‘Rosie and I used to make brownies a lot,’ I said to Suzanne. ‘Basically because they’re really easy.’

‘And they taste good,’ Rosie said, a sulk in her voice.

Suzanne had cracked an egg against the side of a cup and was manoeuvring the yolk from one half of the shell to the other.

‘Remember that time we tried to put treacle in them?’ I said to Rosie.

‘Oh my God,’ Rosie said, dissolving into laughter. ‘It was like sludge. Actual sludge.’

‘When it came out of the oven it had turned into a brick,’ I continued, grinning at the memory. ‘We had to put it straight in the bin.’

‘So they didn’t always taste good?’ Suzanne asked, her voice teasing. She was on to the third egg, her fingers deft and shiny with eggy remnants.

‘The treacle was a mistake,’ Rosie conceded. She seemed mollified by our reminiscing, and she leaned across me to look at the book. Her hair tickled my face. ‘But usually they were great.’

‘These will be great too,’ Suzanne said. She poured the egg whites from the cup into the mixing bowl, gesturing to me to add the sugar.

‘A new tradition,’ I said, doing so. Suzanne’s whole face seemed to lift at these words, making her look suddenly very young. She smiled at me, hopeful.

‘They better be good then,’ Rosie said.

They weren’t.

The macarons we pulled out of the oven did not in any way resemble the beautiful, colourful treats I’d seen in books and patisserie windows. The circles we’d piped on to the tray had ballooned in the oven and merged into several gigantic cracked blobs.

‘Oh,’ Suzanne said. She looked confused.

‘We piped them too big,’ Rosie said.

‘Oh, did we?’ Suzanne’s voice was sarcastic. ‘What was your first clue?’

‘It’s just the first tray,’ I said quickly, before Rosie could respond. ‘We’ll pipe the rest smaller, and with more space between them.’