Sam arches one of her brows. Both have been drawn on with black eyeliner, and the movement exposes a few downy hairs beneath the dark smudge.

“An unexpected challenge from Miss Quincy Carpenter.”

“I’ve got secrets.”

“We all have secrets,” Sam says. “But are you more than the young Martha Stewart you pretend to be on your blog? That’s the real question.”

“How do you know I’m pretending?”

“Because you’re a Final Girl. It’s different for us.”

“I’m not a Final Girl,” I say. “I really never have been. I’m just me. Now, I’m not going to lie and say I don’t think about what happened. I do. But not a lot. I’ve moved past that.”

Sam looks like she doesn’t believe me. Both fake brows are now raised. “So you’re telling me you’ve been cured by the therapeutic value of baking?”

“It helps,” I say.

“Then show me.”

“Show you?”

“Yeah,” Sam says. “Bestow your healing powers on me and bake something.”

“Right now?”

“Sure.” Sam stands, stretches, hauls me out of my chair. “Impress the fuck out of me.”

CHAPTER 7

Baking is a science, as rigorous as chemistry or physics. There are rules that must be followed. Too much of one thing and not enough of another can lead to ruin. I find comfort in this. Outside, the world is an unruly place where men prowl with sharpened knives. In baking, there is only order.

That’s why Quincy’s Sweets exists. When I graduated college with a marketing degree and moved to New York, I still thought of myself as a victim. So did everyone else. Baking seemed the only way to change that. I wanted to pour my runny, sloshing existence into a human-shaped mold and crank up the heat, emerging soft, springy and new.

So far, it’s working.

In the kitchen, I spread twin lines of bowls across the counter, sized according to what they contain. The biggest ones hold the base—powdery mounds of flour and sugar heaped like snowdrifts. Medium bowls are for the glue. Water. Eggs. Butter. In the smallest bowls are the flavors, the tiniest amounts packing the largest punch. Pumpkin puree and orange zest, cinnamon and cranberry.

Sam stares at the array of ingredients, uncertain. “What are you going to bake?”

”We are going to bake orange pumpkin loaf.”

I want Sam to witness firsthand the formula behind baking, to experience its safety, to see how it’s helped me become more than just a girl screaming through the woods away from Pine Cottage.

I want to impress the fuck out of her.

Sam remains still, looking first at me and then our surroundings. I think the kitchen is cozy, done up in soothing greens and blues. There’s a vase of daisies on the windowsill and kitschy pot holders hanging from the walls. The appliances are state-of-the-art but with a retro design. Sam eyes it all with barely concealed terror. She has the look of a feral child dragged suddenly into civilization.

“Do you know how to bake?” I ask.

She laughs. A raucous, throaty one that fills the kitchen. I like the sound. When it’s just me in the kitchen, all is silent.

“It’s easy,” I tell her. “Trust me.”

I position Sam before one row of bowls and take my place before the other. I then show her, step by step, how to fold the butter and sugar together, combine them with the flour, water and eggs, layer in the flavors one at a time. Sam forms the dough the same way she talks—in short, haphazard bursts. Tufts of flour and blots of pumpkin rise from her bowl.

“Um, am I doing this right?”

“Almost,” I say. “Be gentler.”

“You sound like all my ex-boyfriends,” Sam jokes, even though she’s started to follow my advice and mix the ingredients with slightly less force. The results are immediate. “Hey, it’s working!”

“Slow and steady wins the race. That’s the tenth commandment on my blog.”

“You should write a cookbook,” Sam says. “Baking for idiots.”

“I’ve thought about it. Just a regular cookbook, though.”

“What about a book about Pine Cottage?”

I stiffen at the sound of those two words pushed together. Individually, they have no power over me. Pine. Cottage. Nothing but harmless words. But when combined they obtain the sharpness of the knife He shoved into my shoulder and stomach. If I blink, I know I’ll see Janelle emerging from the trees, still technically alive but already dead. So I keep my eyes open, staring at the dough thickening in the bowl in front of me.

“It would be an awfully short book,” I say.

“Oh, yeah.” There’s a false ring to Sam’s voice, as if she’s trying to make it sound like she’s only just considered my memory loss. “Right.”

She’s staring, too, although at me and not her bowl. I feel her gaze on my cheek, as warm as the afternoon sun coming through the kitchen window. I get the uneasy sense she’s testing me somehow. That I’ll fail if I turn to meet her stare. I continue to look at the dough, now a rubbery ball in the bottom of my bowl.

“Did you read Lisa’s book?” I ask.

“Nah,” Sam says. “You?”