There was just enough time for Rosaline to mouth a very quick, very silent Thank you to Alain for not dropping her totally in the shit with her dad before he hurried over to his ride. There he hugged a brief hello to an intimidatingly attractive blond woman, and the two of them sped away.

St. John Palmer got back into his car and Rosaline got in beside him. She’d barely finished fastening her seat belt when it started.

“Your mother was expecting you to call.”

“I’ve only just left the set.”

“You seem to have found plenty of time to socialise.”

She had, in a way, but he had no actual evidence of it. “You mean Alain? We were just both waiting in the same car park.”

“It looked like you were talking.” The rules of the road meant that her father was legally obliged to keep staring straight ahead while he spoke to her. But Rosaline was pretty sure he would have even if they hadn’t.

“Just being polite. I think he’s . . . nice, though?”

“Nice.” Her father held a lot of things in contempt, but for some reason seemed to reserve his most particular ire for a small selection of words that Rosaline had always felt was wholly arbitrary. “You used to have such a good vocabulary.”

“He seems very diligent, capable, intelligent, and”—somehow she thought her father wouldn’t accept hot—“sesquipedalian.”

“Don’t be facetious, Rosaline. It’s beneath you. Or at least it should be.”

She sighed. “Sorry.”

There was one of those “lulling her into a false sense of security” pauses.

“Honestly,” St. John Palmer continued, “I’m a little surprised a man like that is appearing on a show like—what’s it called?”

He knew what it was called. He just liked making her say it.

“Bake Expectations.”

“Still, I suppose once your career’s established you can mess around with whatever hobbies you like. No different from golfing really, is it?”

Her father wasn’t a golfer, but it was one of the few pastimes he didn’t look down on. Which would have been the closest he’d come in a long time to supporting her choices, had it not been so painfully obvious that his approval of Alain’s participation was grounded in the fact he didn’t actually need anything from the show. Whereas Rosaline, who desperately did, was wasting her time and embarrassing her family. “No,” she said. “It’s basically just golf with more raisins.”

St. John Palmer didn’t reply. Perhaps he was punishing Rosaline for her continued facetiousness.

And after a moment or two, he turned on Radio 4 in time to catch the end of the shipping forecast.

Week Two

Pie

Friday

IN SOME WAYS, returning for week two was even stranger than arriving for week one. As soon as Rosaline had left, Patchley House and everything in it started to feel like a bizarrely specific dream. But now she was back, her time at home—taking Amelie to school, going to her job, making endless mini chicken pies—was heading the same way. Which meant there was nothing to distract her from her performance in week one. A performance that had involved freaking out over the inherent futility of what she was doing. Then making a mediocre cake in front of the nation and a complete fool of herself in front of someone she was maybe interested in. C-minus, Rosaline. Must try harder. See me after class.

Having successfully navigated public transport and dumped her bag in her room, she went for a restless wander through the grounds. Short of building a time machine out of hot water crust pastry and the chocolate ganache she should have made last week, there was nothing she could do about Malawigate. But she could do something about her attitude. Because, even though winning Bake Expectations wouldn’t magically transform her into a qualified heart surgeon, Cordelia and St. John Palmer hadn’t raised a quitter.

And while they would never approve of her being on reality TV, they’d probably disown her completely if she went on reality TV and then half-arsed it.

So she had to focus. Do the work. Push herself as hard as she could. Not get distracted by boys. Produce the kind of baketactular that would make viewers at home go “Ooh, that’s quite impressive for week two.”

And as she meandered through the little woodland that ran alongside the Lodge, Rosaline felt she was doing a pretty good job of psyching herself up to be a deadly, single-minded baking machine. Until she saw Alain coming the other way.

Fuck fuck fuck.

Unfortunately, there was nowhere to hide. Well, technically there were loads of places to hide because she could have run up a tree or jumped into a pile of leaves, but if her aim was to avoid another embarrassing situation, then fleeing like an alarmed squirrel probably wasn’t going to help her cause.

“Um,” she said, “hi?”

He gave her one of his half-smiles. “Rosaline.”

They eyed each other across the bracken. And she was once again struck by how quietly stylish Alain was with his shirts and his chinos and, today, a light jacket that seemed to be part of an outfit rather than a concession to the evening breeze. It was like that bit at the end of a game show where they open door number three to show what you could have won if you weren’t a lying sack of shit.

She wondered if she should apologise again. Or if that would just be annoying. So she opened her mouth to say goodbye and found herself apologising for something else. “Sorry about my dad.”

“Not at all.” He flicked back a lock of hair that had escaped its assigned position in the artful whole. “He’s clearly very protective of you.”

“Protective” wasn’t the word Rosaline would have used. But better he thought that than realised how much of a letdown she actually was to her father. “Yeah. He’s, um, yeah.”

Another long pause.

“How about we take a walk?” asked Alain.

Okay. That was good, right? Not that she’d been expecting it. Or hoping for it. Well, not very much. “Are you . . . are you sure?”

He arched a slightly self-mocking brow. “Not at all, Rosaline-um-Palmer. Shall we do it anyway?”

“Maybe it can be another adventure.”

“With the real you this time?”