How to Bake a Perfect Life by Barbara O'Neal Page A

him doesn’t mean he’s a bad person.”
    “Ah, so he did pay?” He sounds incredulous. “Mr. Mafia. Must be nice.”
    I scowl. “He paid the guy before I knew he’d done it. I’m not going to let it stand. Too many strings.”
    “Should have thought of that.”
    Mostly, Ryan and I get along pretty well, but this is a sore spot. He would love to be independent of the family clutch, but chose to stay with the umbrella of the Gallagher Group restaurants. “I raised the money for this bakery myself. I put together the business plan and made it work. You guys always underestimate my brains, which is why I left the Gallagher Group in the first place.”
    “Yeah, because Grandma gave you the house.”
    “I got a little luck after a bunch of bad luck. It happens.” I glance toward Katie, her back long and stiff. “Let’s not do this right now.”
    “Whatever.” He turns away, heads down the steps.
    It makes me furious. “What exactly would you like me to do?” I ask in a quiet voice. “Fall on my face so everyone can say they were right about me?”
    He only glances over his shoulder. “Nobody wants to see you fall on your face.” A sudden flash of humor, the same thing that always saves our tense arguments, comes to the rescue. “Well, maybe Stephanie does.”
    My sister, who runs the family steakhouse with my father and has not spoken to me since I adopted Cat as my mentor. “And Dad.”
    “No. He loves you. He just hates Cat.”
    “Then he should have thought of that when he decided tokeep Dane.” My philandering ex-husband, who worked for the Gallagher Group until recently.
    “You gotta get over that.” Ryan chuckles, shaking his head. “It’s been what—eight years?”
    “I don’t care. As far as I’m concerned, my family chose my ex-husband over me.”
    He mimes crossing his arms over his chest and sticking out his lower lip, then stomps his foot, in case I didn’t get it.
    I wave him off, smiling. “Thank you for your help.”
    “I’ll be back later.”
    Katie moves Merlin away from the truck and comes up the steps, dragging the dog behind her. “I’ve got to get to work,” I say. “Let’s check the backyard for escape routes, and you can play with him out there.”
    We make a bed of old blankets on the sunporch in Katie’s room, and she agrees to keep the door closed at night and to leash Merlin if he needs to go outside. The pair head into the backyard, Katie with a book, Merlin snuffling the perimeter like a soldier.
    A soldier. Before I head into the bakery kitchen, I stop at the computer upstairs and send a quick email to Sofia:
Katie is fine. Dog is here. Any news? How are you holding up? Be sure to EAT! Love, Mom
    And then at last I escape into the kitchen, where the scent of yeast can help me forget, at least for a little while, that my daughter is in the first real trouble of her life and there is almost nothing I can do to help her.

Sofia’s Journal
    M AY 21, 20—
    I am writing this as I sit by Oscar’s bed. He is almost unrecognizable. No, that is not accurate. Not almost. He is unrecognizable. I would never have known it was him. There are so many bandages and tubes. I can see bits and pieces of his face—his mouth and chin are very swollen and red. His eyelids are a deep, terrible red, swollen and marked. His eyelashes are gone, but the nurse said he was lucky he kept his eyelids, a picture that gives me shudders every time I think about it .
    He’s a mummy, really. A mummy with one leg. He hasn’t come out of the coma yet .
    I thought they were going to fly us back to San Antonio yesterday, but he had a bad turn and then something else happened and … I don’t know. The chaplain is here often, making sure I’m okay, which tells me how worried they are that he’ll die .
    He is not going to die. I keep telling him that he cannot give up, no matter what. Katie will be an orphan. Our baby will never see him. He or she will be here in less than two months,