Chapter 14: The Tasting

"Why?" I asked her. "Why would you come?"

Shelby's mother put her hands in the pockets of her cardigan.

"Because I've watched from across the street long enough," she said, and went back down the stairs.

On Saturday at a quarter past two I walked into the Harbor House ballroom with a cake box in my arms.

The same ballroom.

I wore jeans, a white blouse and my mother's pearls.

Hayes walked on my left.

Emmy walked on my right with Biscuit on a leash, because she said the dog deserved to see this.

There were maybe sixty people in rows facing a long table.

Buyers sat in linen jackets, and a man from The Post and Courier held a notebook.

Emmy whispered that the woman in silver bangles was the food writer from Atlanta.

Mrs. Mattox sat in the front row.

My father sat beside her in his navy suit, his hands folded on his knee, exactly the way he'd sat at my wedding.

Shelby stood at a podium in pink silk with a ring light on a stand beside her.

She was mid-sentence.

"...and this cake is my family's story, you guys. Three generations of Charleston women..."

She saw me.

The sentence stopped.

"Don't let me interrupt," I said, and sat down in the back row with the box on my knees.

Shelby's smile came back a second late.

"Okay! So. Without further ado." She waved at the kitchen doors. "Chef?"

A chef in a tall white hat came out pushing a cart with a silver dome on it.

He set it on the table, took a breath, and lifted the dome.

The cake was four layers tall at the edges.

In the middle, it was about two.

The top had caved in. Lemon curd had slid out of the crater and run down one side onto the doily.

The room made a small noise all together.

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