The Holiday Swap(76)
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After getting her tattoo, she had driven home to Starlight Peak without stopping, putting the Taylor Swift holiday album that had been her favorite since she was a teenager on repeat. She had been desperate to see her sister, but that hadn’t turned out the way she had hoped it would. First, she had run into Jake Greenman outside the bakery—relieved to see a friendly, familiar face. But it quickly became clear that she had offended him in some way, simply by saying a casual hello and asking how he was. Their strange and awkward encounter had left Cass unsettled, and it obviously had something to do with Charlie . . . but she had no clue what was going on. And then, she and Charlie had had anything but a happy reunion. I trusted you, Cass. The worst idea I’ve ever had, clearly.
Cass knew she had taken matters into her own hands by saying the things she had said to Sasha. But did Charlie really want to be walked all over like that? This was not the Charlie she thought she knew like the back of her hand.
Cass walked into her small kitchen and filled the coffeemaker she had there for the rare occasions she was not down in the bakery first thing. Then she checked the starter, which she had brought upstairs with her the night before, wrapped in one of their grandmother’s tea cozies and placed in the warmest area of the apartment. She’d fed it before bed and it had looked okay—but now it was frothy again rather than bubbly, with a watery layer on top. “Damn it,” she muttered, carrying it to the sink to pour away the foul-smelling liquid. “I trusted you, too, Charlie.”
As Cass waited for the coffee to brew, she began to feel more frustrated. It wasn’t just the starter Charlie had messed up. She had said something to Cass about moving the ordering process online, which was yet another thing Cass was going to need to figure out how to fix now that she was home. And she had allowed Sarah Rosen from Makewell’s into the bakery! Cass hadn’t exactly done a great job of keeping Charlie’s life in order in L.A.—but it seemed Charlie had done an even worse job of holding down the fort in Starlight Peak.
The bakery’s laptop was sitting on the kitchen table. Cass hadn’t had a chance to check the bakery e-mail all week, assuming—perhaps wrongly—that Charlie was handling everything. She toggled the mouse pad, and when she saw her face appear on-screen, quickly turned off the camera. It was a program she didn’t recognize called Live.Li. She clicked a tab called “past videos” and watched a few of Charlie and Walter cheekily giving baking tutorials—one of them a how-to on how to create the bakery’s signature lemon squares. What was Charlie thinking? It was a recipe that had been in her family for decades, and Charlie thought it was somehow okay to just share it with the world like that? Cass gritted her teeth and watched another video about the sourdough starter, and then another that seemed to have nothing in it. She fast-forwarded until she saw Walter, Charlie, and Brett.
Her sister’s voice was angry, almost unrecognizable. Cass watched, aghast, as her sister laid into her ex-boyfriend. Why was this recorded? As her sister went on to say some unflattering things about the town, Cass’s heart sank even more.
“Charlie, no,” Cass whispered.
She searched for a way to delete the video but couldn’t find one. So she quickly exited the program and sat still. She had asked her sister to deal with Brett—but she understood now that it had been wrong for the twins to think they could solve each other’s problems. Cass needed to deal with all this herself.
Cass opened the bakery’s e-mail account, thinking she could write to Brett and try to set things straight in a way that would provide their relationship with proper, irrevocable closure. Charlie had been rough on him, yes—but with some distance, Cass could now see how toxic his behavior had been. He had been disrespectful of her wishes and refused to take no for an answer—which worked fine in business dealings but was an unacceptable way to deal with another human being. As she contemplated what to write, the new e-mail messages downloaded. One in particular caught her eye: it was from Sarah Rosen. The subject line was “Enlisting Your Consulting Services?”
Dear Cass and family,
I so enjoyed my visit to Woodburn Breads, and cannot stop thinking about those plum cardamom linzer cookies! They were truly epic—and I’ve tasted a lot of baked goods.
Cass, I know it might seem like we are at cross-purposes here: you run a family bakery, I run a national bakery chain. But the truth is, with someone like you on board, and with a location like the one your family owns and runs Woodburn Breads out of, we could create something incredibly special, something that would bring both Makewell’s and your family’s bakery to a whole new level.
I’d love to meet up and talk with you about the attached offer. Makewell’s would like to buy the Woodburn Breads building, as well as the rights to some of your recipes. As you can see from the attached, this is an incredibly lucrative deal. Some might even call it life-changing! I ask that you please consider it, with this in mind: you would still be a part of the bakery. I have included a clause to hire you as a consultant, which means you would be on salary to continue to help us develop recipes for the chain, which would be a part of our Signature Heritage line, all inspired by Woodburn Breads. This is a way for your bakery to live on in a changing world—rather than being shuttered when Makewell’s moves in and takes over 60 percent of the market share, which is what happens each time a Makewell’s moves into a neighborhood. (Attached are the numbers to support this.)