Page 82 of Even After Sunset

More like fifteen but, whatever… Potay-to, potah-to.

I come back into the kitchen and she continues: “The gates open in fifteen minutes! What the heck am I going to do?”

Still with the “heck” and “gosh” and “geez”. I’m genuinely curious what it would take for her to drop a big fat F-bomb.

More than four trays of ruined cookies fifteen minutes before opening, apparently.

Still, she looks devastated—like her entire baking career is over. Even though, yeah—on second thought: she’s probably right. Her baking career was over the second she stepped foot in a kitchen. Period.

Actually, it was probably over the first time she microwaved a bag of popcorn.

“It’ll be fine,” I tell her, grabbing two trays off the counter. “We’ll figure something out.”

I slide the blackened cookies into the garbage, then do the same with the other two trays.

“We don’t have time to figure something out! The gates open infifteen minutes!”

“Actually,” I glance at the clock on the microwave, “twelve minutes.”

Her jaw drops like a character in a Disney cartoon, and she looks at me as if I’m personally responsible for the passing of time.

“This is just great. I’m going to have to close up early again tonight!”

“You’re not going to have to close up early.”

She sighs loudly. “I have a total of ninety-six cookies, Silas. I’m going to have to close early.”

“You’re not,” I tell her again.

I wiggle my eyebrows dramatically.

“I have an idea.”

Chapter Twenty-Four

Jackie

“No way,” I say. “That is such a bad idea.”

Silas plunks the antique (okay—vintage) cotton-candy machine in the middle of the table.

“It’s a fantastic idea.”

I’m trying hard not to lose my patience, but I am already stressed enough without Silas unleashing a really,reallymessy, probably defective appliance that he doesn’t have the first clue about operating. In a ten-foot by thirty-two-foot enclosed space. Ten minutes before opening.

I take a breath and remind myself he is only trying to help. He is beingnice.

“This isn’t the kind of thing you suddenly launch into, totally unprepared, at a time when things are already off the rails.”

“You didn’t plan for us to try this machine today. Or to sell cotton candy,” he says. “I get that.”

“It’s not that we didn’t plan for it…”

Okay, it totally is. But he would never get that.

”It’s that we’re notpreparedfor it.”

“Isn’t that the same thing as not planning for it?”

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