She laughed right in my face.
After months of work and hundreds of my own dollars spent creating the wedding cake of her dreams, my best friend’s daughter looked me dead in the eye and told me to get over it.
She called it “practice.” A trial run I did for free out of the goodness of my heart. Then she cancelled two weeks before the wedding, ghosted my calls, and hired a cheaper baker to steal my design.
There I was, standing at her reception, looking at a lopsided, ugly copy of my masterpiece.
What she didn’t count on was that my design was copyrighted, my proof was already online for all her guests to see, and gravity doesn’t really care if it’s your special day.
A Promise Between Friends: The Smell of Sugar and Old Memories
The bell over the door chimed, cutting through the low hum of the ovens. The scent of my bakery—a mix of yeasted dough, melting chocolate, and the clean, sweet smell of powdered sugar—usually calmed me. It was my sanctuary, the place where flour and butter and patience became art. But when I saw Sarah walk in, her arm looped through her daughter’s, a different kind of warmth filled the room, one that smelled like thirty years of shared history.
Sarah’s face was lit with a proprietary pride that only the mother of a newly engaged daughter can have. “Lena, look who I’ve got!”
Chloe, her daughter, was beaming, a diamond the size of a small beetle glittering on her finger. I’d known her since she was a freckle-faced kid selling us Thin Mints from her Girl Scout sash. Now she was all grown up, a stranger in a familiar package. I wiped my flour-dusted hands on my apron and came around the counter to hug them both.
“I heard the news! Chloe, congratulations! He’s a lucky guy,” I said, meaning it.
“He really is,” Chloe giggled, flashing the ring again. “And I’m going to have the most perfect wedding. The most perfect. Which is why we’re here.”
I smiled, already knowing where this was going. “Let me guess. You’re not here for a morning bun.”
A Sketch on a Napkin
We sat at the small iron table I kept in the corner for consultations. Chloe pulled out her phone and started swiping through a gallery of impossible cakes. We were talking five tiers, cascading sugar flowers, hand-painted gold leaf, and architectural elements that looked like they belonged on a cathedral in France.
“I want it to be epic,” she said, her eyes wide with vision. “Like something no one has ever seen before. The flowers have to be stephanotis and lily of the valley, and I want this lace pattern piped on, the one from my grandmother’s wedding dress.”
It was ambitious. It was the kind of project that would consume weeks, a masterpiece of sugar and engineering. As she talked, my fingers itched. I grabbed a pen and a clean napkin from the dispenser. The ideas were already taking shape in my head—how to support the weight, how to get the delicate droop of the lily petals just right. I started sketching, the lines flowing from the pen almost on their own.
Chloe leaned over, her voice dropping to a conspiratorial whisper. “Oh my god, yes. That’s it. That’s the one.”
The drawing on the napkin was more than a sketch; it was a promise. It was intricate, beautiful, and wildly, terrifyingly expensive. I looked from the napkin to Sarah’s hopeful face, and felt the familiar tug-of-war between my business brain and my heart.
My husband, Mark, always told me I let my heart win too often. Thinking of him and our son, Leo, and the college tuition bills that were just a few years away, I knew he was right.
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