Page 11 of A New Year Baby

CHAPTER 6

Sometimes the townsfolk wander by late, craving a midnight snack.

The bakery is full of fresh goodies anyway, and I hate for them to go to waste, so I usually don’t mind opening the door for a few locals who are passing by with hungry looks on their faces. But tonight, I just forgot to close up entirely. I guess my mind was preoccupied.

Putting down my broom, I head out into the store, and I see a couple. The woman is turned away from me, hobbling around on crutches. One foot is wrapped up in bandages, and the other is clad in a single, high-heeled boot. But peeking above the boot, I see an extremely muscled calf leading into a very muscled thigh.

There’s only one woman in town with legs like that.

When she turns around to look at me, I remember Eve’s words from earlier, echoing in my head.Clara has suffered a life-altering injury.

“Stella!” Clara calls out happily. Then she hiccups. Wow, she’s totally smashed. “I want cookies. Can I please have some cookies?”

Memories rush back to me, of when she was just a child. She was maybe around ten when Jack and I were in high school. I would often sleep over at their house, and wake up to a pajama-clad Clara demanding that I make her cookies.

Jack and I would take care of her together, and we would let her sprinkle some chocolate chips, chopped macadamia nuts, or marshmallows onto the cookies before baking. Jack would mix her up a chocolate milk, maybe make us all some macaroni and cheese.

Then all three of us would snuggle up together on the couch under blankets, watching cartoons until we fell asleep together. We may have even watchedMadagascar.I swallow back the flood of bittersweet memories. All the times I watched Jack take care of his sisters, and thought he would make an amazing father.

All the moments that I thought we’d experience again someday with our own children.

“Yes, Clara,” I say eyeing the strange man she is with suspiciously and suddenly feeling very protective of her. I have half a mind to scold her for drinking too much, and send her upstairs to bed with Luna, but I realize that she is an adult. “Cookies are just over here,” I say, leading her to the back of the store.

The youngest Frost sister dances around the store happily, humming a few bars of Tchaikovsky as she peruses all the desserts. I am a bit flabbergasted just to watch her move. She is literally more graceful on crutches, drunk out of her mind, with one leg out of commission, than I have ever been in my life. She twirls on the toe of her boot, so rapidly that I get dizzy.

If it were me, I would go stumbling directly into the wall of bread. And all the shelves and loaves would surely come tumbling down directly onto my head.

Maybe I should sign Luna up for some ballet classes. Or—maybe her Aunt Clara can give her some private lessons. I shake the thought away.

“Who’s the guy, Clara?” I ask her quietly when we are far enough away that I can’t be heard. Besides, he seems distracted with viewing my cheesecakes.

“He’s a ssstranger,” she says drunkenly, with a smile. “Such a sexy stranger, right?”

“I mean, yeah. He looks okay. He’s a handsome guy, I guess. If you like that sort of thing.”

“I’m trying to have a super casual, super anonymous hookup. I met him at The Drunken Elf,” Clara tells me with a giggle. “I flirted with a stranger, isn’t that brave? Evie told me to be brave.”

“Very brave of you,” I tell her, and I mean it. “What happened to your ankle?”

“Oh,” she says, looking down sadly. She grabs a baguette off the shelf, and breaks it in half, while imitating the noise of snapping bone. “Broken. Dead. Crushed. Basically, my life is over.”

“I am so sorry, sweetie,” I say softly, horrified. Everything she’s worked for…

She takes a bite of the baguette she broke. “Eh. It’s okay. At least I met a cute guy. Shhhhh,” she says, smacking my arm with the baguette. “Don’t tell him I’m a ballerina. I don’t want him to think I’m weird. I’m trying to act like a normal girl. I’m super undercover.”

I smile at her. Well, it’s been a while since someone smacked me with a baguette. Any kind of baguette. I want to tell Clara that she isn’t being very undercover when she’s dancing all around the store like the Sugarplum Fairy, but she seems so happy. If the alcohol and the handsome stranger are helping her forget about her pain and her troubles, who am I to judge.

“What’s the best cookie?” Clara asks, suddenly serious. She points at the cookies with the baguette like it’s a matter of life and death. “I need to make the perfect choice.”

“They are all tasty. Try a few,” I tell her gently.

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