Page 66 of Let Me Win You

There was no time to mess up, anyway. But we had practiced it before and knew what to do. As Jess carefully positioned the tower in the right place with Invi helping her, I rolled out and stamped the white fondant. Together, we covered the tower with the fondant to be painted with pink and gold bricks.

I held my breath as Jess carefully cut an opening for the balcony door in the tower. At that moment, one of the camera crew tripped over a cable and bumped into Jess from behind.

“Watch out!” I screamed a belated warning.

Invi caught the crewman under his arm, stopping him from falling into our cake, but Jess’s arm jerked. Her knife slipped, cutting a chunk out of the cake underneath the tower. The delicate wafer structure cracked in the middle. Its top part crashed, taking some of our carefully constructed castle with it.

With a strangled cry of utter despair, Jess threw her hands up into the air and froze.

I stared at our ruined cake in disbelief, hoping it was all just in my head and the cake was still fine somehow.

“I’m sorry,” the crewman mumbled. “I’m so, so sorry, guys.”

It felt like every sound and all activity in the room was suddenly suspended. The show host rushed to us, drawn to the disaster like a shark to a sinking boat.

“It looks like our team here experienced a devastating setback,” he crooned with glee, frantically gesturing for thecameras to zoom in on our misfortune. “Unbelievable, simply unbelievable,” he kept repeating in a manufactured anguish. “Will they ever be able to recover?” He took a dramatic pause, before shouting with an increased enthusiasm, “Stay tuned after this commercial break!”

A signal sounded, announcing the break and a brief time off cameras for us. All three judges joined the host at our counter, wondering if we were even planning to proceed.

From across the room, Aidan raised a bushy eyebrow under his pretentious, crisp-white chef hat. Amusement mixed with pity in his expression, despite his best efforts to school it into something more sympathetic for the cameras. Then he must have realized that our failure meant he almost certainly won the challenge, and glee spread on his face unconstrained.

“We’re fucked,” Jess exhaled, staring blankly at our ruined creation.

“We can fix it,” Invi suggested optimistically. “How badly is the spare wafer tube damaged? Can we hold it together with the fondant? Or glue it with the butter cream? Then, we can take off the top cake layer. The cake will be a little smaller, but?—”

“It’s no use.” Jess shook her head, devastated. “A smaller, patched up cake will never win the challenge. We lost, no matter what we do now. I’m so sorry, guys,” she sniffled. “It’s all my fault. The cake is ruined.”

“Ruined? Or…” I scratched behind my ear, slowly walking around the table with the cake.

Ruins didn’t always mean failure. More often than not, they had their own kind of beauty. Even such an evil entity like a mortal sin had a good side. If envy could be turned into a healthy motivation for self-improvement, maybe our cake could still be turned into a winning design too?

“What if we don’t fix it?” I asked, as new possibilities emerged to me from the wreckage of the cake.

“Do you want to give up?” the host asked, shoving the microphone in Jess’s face.

She sighed, hugging herself. “Might as well.”

“We can’t just give up,” Invi protested. “Now without at least trying.”

“Trying for what?” Jess asked uncertainly.

“For something new.” I carefully removed some of the fallen pieces of the tower, leaving a few on the cake, like crumbled mortar. “We’ll change the design. Look.” I grabbed the knife from Jess and cut deeper the gorge in the damaged layer, turning it from the neatly landscaped castle grounds into something that could be decorated like a crevasse in a pile of rubble overgrown with ivy and shrubs. “It’s no longer a princess’s castle, but the haunted ruins of it.”

“Haunted?” Jess scrunched her brow with a skeptic expression.

“Very, very haunted,” I repeated in a deep, sinister voice. “Its crumbling walls are overgrown with ivy and moss. Instead of the rose bushes, there are weeping willows in the shadows, draped in cobwebs. And the moat…” I paused, thinking about what to do with all that painted fondant and caramelized sugar water we had already put in. Taking it out now would only waste precious time.

“It’s not a moat, but a swamp,” Invi announced brightly. “With duckweed and calla lilies.Blackcalla lilies,” he added, matching my foreboding voice from earlier. “The magical, sinister kind.”

“Because there is more than one way toescape reality,” I concluded, raising a finger. “And fairy tales aren’t always pink or covered in glitter.”

“We’ll need to change the colors then.” Jess cupped her chin, looking more intrigued than devastated now.

“Most of these things can be just painted over, with green for moss and mold, or with gray and black for decay.”

“The princess can be the water nymph? Or the forest witch?” Jess had perked up.

Our combined enthusiasm for the new design was steadily growing now.

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