Page 48 of Holly Jolly Cake Fight
She kept her body language open and proud, beaming as though she was happy no matter how the victory was packaged. It was awful. Even when Jannie practically apologized for their prize — a phone call home, a place Candace didn’t have — she accepted it with the utmost of grace.
Candace wasn’t a gentle soul protected by a fragile, prickly shell. She was a gentle soul protected by granite. Oh, it took its scratches and showed its wear, but it wasn’t going to break. That was a good thing. That meant Laurin just needed time to erode through it. He didn’t have to worry about losing too much of his own blood.
Which was an especially good thing tonight. Being away from his family weighed heavily on him. If they hadn’t won, if he’d heard another team get awarded calls home, he might have been the one broken tonight. As it was, only being able to see his family through the tablet the crew brought to the cabin was hard enough.
Manon, his sister, was in town from London. She promised to stay stateside until Laurin came home so they could have a real conversation, even when Laurin insisted she shouldn’t waste her money changing her plane ticket if he wasn’t back by Sunday.
“Even if I didn’t care if I saw you, I’d want to see you just to hear all about the show,” she said, always practical to a fault. “And I do want to see you. It’s only fifty dollars to change the ticket.”
“And work?”
“Vacation days. I’ve got some extra days I can use now . . . unless you don’t want me to stay.”
“No, please do. I’ve missed you. Is Vivvy driving you nuts?”
Manon laughed. “Of course not! She’s amazing, Laur. She’s lucky to have you. We both are. I’m gonna stay until you’re back. Maybe a little longer.”
“What about Vincenzo?” Laurin was sure that Manon’s fiancé wasn’t here or else he would have jumped on camera with Manon.
Manon just shrugged.
Laurin didn’t know what that meant, but the clock was running on his ten minutes. Mom got on screen then, and Laurin didn’t get a chance to say anything except, “English,maman. They’re gonna make me translate this if it’s in French.”
She was too excited to stop, though. Honestly, it was for the best. She mentioned Candace a lot, but it was clear only the first two episodes aired. The words she had for Candace were not pleasant, and there wasn’t enough time to clear things up there. Laurin was given the cue for three minutes remaining, and he gladly asked for Genevieve.
“Daddy, daddy! Did you save me all the cookies?” Vivvy asked before she even got in front of the camera.
“Vivvy, you don’t like old cookies,” Laurin reminded her. The moment her face popped up on his tablet, he felt better. No matter how unstable his life was, Genevieve was always his anchor. She was always there to remind him life was pretty good.
“You just baked them two days ago.” He could only see her face, but he could imagine her hand on her hip, mimicking her grandma. “Put bread in the bag.”
“Is that when you watched the episode? We baked those last week. Time goes different here. The next episode we watch together has already happened. I’ll be sitting next to you, and I’ll be on the screen, too.”
Vivvy’s eyes went wide, but she clinched back up in a flash. “Did you eat all the cookies?”
“I ate some of the cookies.”
“Did you eat Miss Candace’s cookies?”
He nodded. “They were very good.”
“Can you make them for me?”
He could. His wouldn’t be as good as Candace’s, but he could if she gave him the recipe.
That’s not what he wanted. He wanted Candace to bake them in his kitchen. If he could convince her to visit him, even just for a week, he thought he could prove her wrong about the impossibility here.
The week after Christmas, he thought. She’d already be down here for the finale. Would it be any inconvenience for her to stay a little longer?
“I’ll see what I can do,” he told her, and then she forgot everything about cookies and launched into a story about the field trip to the zoo they had last week.
The one-minute warning hurt a lot. “I gotta go, Vivvy. But I’ll see you soon, I promise. They’re . . .” His voice trailed off when he noticed the cameraman lurking in the corner of the kitchen flagging him with a hand sign, flashing an open hand twice. Ten minutes.
Laurin shook his head in confusion.
The cameraman mouthed the words, “Ten more minutes. Candace to you.”
It was cruel that they were limited at all, and it was cruel that he and Candace were the only ones allowed to talk to their families. Even if Candace didn’t have family to talk to, there must have been someone she missed, someone she wanted to see.
