It was strange waiting for the judging when it was just the three of them—Alain, who was still looking shattered and sullen, went off for a walk; and Nora sat under a tree, contentedly reading The Scandalous Spanish Magnate’s Pregnant Mistress.

“Well,” Rosaline said to Colin Thrimp and his camera operator, “I wasn’t crying so I think that went better than last time.”

And as it turned out, she was right. In fact, she’d sort of smashed it, claiming the win, which made her feel great, except for the tiny detail that it was a lot easier to do a good job at something you’d already practised loads.

“I thought I did well, considering,” remarked Alain pensively in his post-judging interview, “given that I’ve not made dulce de leche since before the competition started.”

There were sufficiently few of them left that they couldn’t not eat lunch together—which made for an awkward dining experience.

“Are you enjoying your book?” Alain asked Nora in what Rosaline now recognised as his “secretly mocking you” tone.

She shrugged. “Well, you know. There’s a secret baby and a sexy Spaniard, what more can you want?”

“Literary merit, perhaps?” offered Alain.

Nora gave him a withering stare. “One of the best things about being seventy-three is that you can read whatever you like.”

“The last thing I read all the way through”—Rosaline made a game attempt to smooth things over—“was a book for nine- to twelve-year-olds about a young witch who discovers last Tuesday is missing.”

“How about you, Alain?”

Rosaline would not have trusted either the edge in Nora’s voice or the look in her eyes, but Alain apparently had no qualms. “Lincoln in the Bardo.”

“And what happens in the end?” asked Nora, in the same voice, with the same look.

“Plot,” returned Alain, “in the conventional sense is not the point of the novel.”

“You haven’t finished it, have you?”

“In case you haven’t noticed, I’m in the final of a televised baking competition. I’ve had other things to do.”

Folding her sandwich box into a neat square of cardboard, Nora smiled. “See, when I’m enjoying a book, I bring it with me.”

“Not all books require the same degree of focus. I prefer—”

Suddenly unable to maintain even a facade of politeness, Rosaline laughed almost literally in Alain’s face. “Oh my God. Just admit you haven’t read the fancy book that you’re only reading anyway so people will be impressed that you’re reading a fancy book, you gigantic hipster piece of shit.”

This had clearly made Nora’s day.

As for Alain, he flushed and then paled, and then raised an eyebrow. “Is ‘piece of shit’ really the wittiest insult you can come up with?”

“Probably.” Rosaline shrugged. “Because unlike you, I don’t spend my free time coming up with inventive ways to be cruel about people just to make myself feel less pathetic.”

“Somebody who has made your life choices,” he drawled out in his poshest, nastiest voice, “is in no position to call anybody else pathetic.”

She rolled her eyes. “Oh, Alain, Alain, Alain. I’m sure that would have been devastating if I gave a crap about what you think.”

“Well, you cared enough to turn Liv against me.”

“No, you did that yourself. Because, funnily enough, women don’t like it when you try to make them fuck your girlfriend. Now come on.” She stood and helped Nora gather up the remains of her lunch. “We should be back on-set.”

In the ballroom, Grace Forsythe and the judges were already assembled, and the three finalists hastened to their stations for the briefing.

“I hope you’re ready, mes amis boulangers,” began Grace Forsythe, “because for your final, final baketacular of the final, final episode of this series, which is to say the final, we have a doozy of a challenge for you. We want you to produce your finest, most elegant, most exquisite, most trophy-winning, series-ending entremets.”

She put on her exposition face for the sake of viewers at home. “These are layered mousse cakes originally served between courses or entre mets as the French would have it. And because they often need to be frozen overnight, you’ll be starting work now and finishing tomorrow just in time for the celebratory high tea. You have three hours from the count of three. Three, darlings.”

Okay. This was it. Really it. The final it. Everything came down to this: Rosaline’s ability to get mousse to set, biscuit to snap, and mirror glaze to, well, mirror.

It felt strange knowing this was the last time any of them would be in the ballroom, trying to make something ludicrous and extravagant in far too little time in an environment totally unsuited for it. Could it really only have been a couple of months since she’d stood here, forgetting how to blanch almonds, and terrified she’d never done anything except make bad decisions and disappoint people?

Because she’d finally worked out that life wasn’t the blind bake. The aim wasn’t to follow someone else’s vague instructions in the hope you’d produce something they’d approve of to a set of standards they hadn’t told you.

It was your ex-girlfriend coming through for you when nobody else did.

It was yelling at your kid’s teacher for being casually biphobic.

It was having the same goddamn argument about brushing your teeth every night for four years.

It was maybe meeting someone who was like nothing you thought you were looking for.

It was winning a TV baking competition. Or not winning it.

Or getting chased by a goat you thought was a bull.

It didn’t matter what it was. It just mattered that it was yours.

Sunday

“WHAT I’VE GOT for you today,” said Nora, placing her bake, or technically her freeze, before the judges with a lot less ceremony than everybody else used, “is a tiramisu entremets. It’s the flavours of a tiramisu, which I like, but it’s an entremets, which I’ve never made before.”

Nora’s cake was a pristine disc of shiny dark chocolate, decorated with truffles and uncharacteristically delicate sugar work.

“I’m impressed with your presentation,” said Marianne Wolvercote.