Page 70 of The Woman Who Said Yes

39

THE BIG DAY

‘Oh my God. Why did I ever get into this? What was I thinking?’

I wake with a jolt as Eva’s voice rings through the flat. ‘Eva?’ I sit up and, realising that Eva’s side of the bed is empty, I scramble out and find her in the living room, staring wild-eyed at her phone. ‘What’s happened? What’s going on?’

‘It’s a disaster,’ she announces, tears springing from her eyes.

‘My God, darling.’ I throw my arms around her, pulling her close. And for a moment, as she gulps into my shoulder, I think a terrible thing. I think, Thank God for that. Thank you, whoever you are up there, for stopping this wedding. Now everything is going to be okay.

As she steps back, my entire body tenses in preparation for being struck by a lightning bolt as punishment for my terrible thoughts. I hardly dare to ask what’s happened, or what he said. ‘Eves,’ I start, ‘are you… okay?’

She blots her eyes with the cuff of her silk rose-patterned pyjamas. ‘Not really.’

I swallow hard. ‘What did he say?’

‘That he fucked it up,’ she mutters.

‘Oh, darling.’ I’m running through what else I can possibly say. I’m so sorry, he didn’t deserve you, maybe it’s for the best… No, not that! You can never say it was ‘for the best’. ‘So,’ I start, ‘did Dom⁠—’

‘Oh, that wasn’t Dom,’ she exclaims. ‘It was Leon.’

‘Leon?’

‘The guy who was making the cake? The baker? You met him at my drinks do⁠—’

‘Oh yes.’ Now I’m thoroughly confused. ‘Is he… all right?’

She chokes out a mirthless laugh. ‘Oh yeah, he’s all right. Well, not really – he’s upset and hungover and he’s so sorry, he doesn’t quite know what went wrong…’ She thrusts her phone at me, and I peer at the photo, unsure of what it is that I’m looking at. It appears to be a small heap of pale brown soggy mush, like something you’d sidestep on the pavement. A sign that a bottomless Prosecco occasion spiralled out of control. ‘What is this?’ I ask.

‘The cake! The croquem-fucking-bouche!’

‘What? That’s it?’

‘Yeah!’ she cries.

‘It’s… it’s not how I imagined it.’

‘No, nor me,’ she says bitterly.

I squint at the picture again. ‘So it, what… just collapsed?’

Eva nods. ‘Seems like it, yeah. I think he tried to rush it. God knows what happened⁠—’

‘Well, is there time to make another one?’ I ask.

‘No, there isn’t. I can’t believe it,’ she says, tossing her phone onto her pink velvet sofa. ‘He said he had to do it this way – bake the profiteroles yesterday but fill them with cream and assemble it and do all the fancy spun sugar stuff this morning. Said it wouldn’t stay upright otherwise. That it’ll only last a few hours before it flops…’ She sniffs loudly and seems to gather herself together. ‘Stupid idiot,’ she mutters.

‘Yeah,’ I murmur. ‘He’s really let you down.’

‘No, not Leon,’ she retorts. ‘I mean, me for asking him in the first place. We got talking about the wedding on a shoot and he said he’d made them before – that it was his speciality and all his friends had had them and it’d look amazing…’ She pauses, shaking her head. ‘It was his idea all along. I just wanted a normal cake!’

I look at her, trying to make sense of this. ‘You met him on a shoot? But I thought he was a master baker?’

‘I can think of something else to call him,’ she announces. ‘No, he was the photographer’s assistant. Cakes are his sideline. He’s been trying to get onto Bake Off for years but never even got an audition. So anyway, he went out and got pissed last night and that’s why he messed it up…’

‘Oh, God,’ I murmur. ‘But, look… it’s only a cake. Everything else is going to be perfect. Shall I make some coffee? Isn’t Milla due soon?’