Chapter 20: Four Tiers

By Thursday night the bakery looked like a construction site.

Four cake boards lay on the steel table, in four sizes, each wrapped in silver foil.

Eleven chiffon layers sat on racks around the room, trimmed and cooled and filled with raspberry or orange blossom cream.

Cass stood in the middle of it all in overalls with her blond bob in a bandanna.

She was holding a power drill.

"What is the drill for?" I asked.

"I don't know. The fiance said bring it."

The fiance, in a hardware store apron, stood beside her with a box of wooden dowels and a level.

"Structural support," he said. "I looked it up."

"You looked up wedding cake?"

"I looked up load-bearing."

"That's a real concern," Lark said gravely.

She had come straight from the aquarium in her fleece, and she was washing her hands at the sink for the third time.

"I'm good with weight," she said. "I carry buckets of fish all day."

"Then you're on the tiers," I said. "You hold them while I set the dowels."

"Yes, Chef."

"Do not call me that."

"Yes, Noor."

Cass raised an eyebrow, and we both pretended not to see it.

She had been oddly delicate with us since Sunday lunch, as if she wasn't sure whether to tease us or hug us.

She had settled on teasing, which was a relief.

We started with the base tier.

It was a fourteen-inch round, vanilla with raspberry, as tall as my forearm and heavier than it looked.

I pushed in the dowels in a circle.

The fiance held the level and read out the bubble.

"Slightly left," he murmured.

"Slightly left," I repeated.

Keep reading free with an account. Start My Best Friend's Stepmother's Niece Is Off Limits from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.