Rosaline was going home. She was definitely going home.

“I make this about once a week.” Josie’s voice floated cheerfully across the ballroom as Colin Thrimp and a camera wielder assembled at her station. “It’s actually one of the oldest leavened breads in the world.”

Come on, Rosaline. If your neolithic ancestors could do this, you can do this. Although, by that logic, she should also be able to make a flint arrowhead and shoot a mammoth with it.

Right. One thing at a time. Stop worrying about the phone. Wake the fuck up. Think this through.

They had an hour, which meant it had to be fairly straightforward and Rosaline knew dough usually needed to rest anywhere from fifteen to ninety minutes.

Half an hour? That seemed . . . right? Safe? And in-the-middle enough that even if it was wrong it couldn’t be too far wrong. But it did mean she had to start right the hell now.

She whisked water and a little oil into the starter, then gradually added the dry ingredients. The problem was, she couldn’t remember if this was a work-the-shit-out-of-it bread or a barely-touch-it bread. From the way Ricky’s arms were going—and wasn’t the internet going to love that—he’d definitely taken the work-the-shit-out-of-it route.

“What are you doing?” asked Colin Thrimp.

Rosaline looked at the ball of dough between her hands. “So this is a technical process that we bakers call squishing. I want to make sure the dough’s absorbed the flour. And after that, I’m probably going to leave it alone for a bit.”

Normally, at this point Rosaline would be fretting about her bake, but there wasn’t a huge amount to fret about yet—unless, of course, she’d fucked it up so hard and so immediately that when she came back tomorrow she’d find her dough, instead of rising, had rearranged itself into the words “you suck.” So, instead, she fretted about everything else.

About the aliens in the boiler.

About whatever the fuck was going on with the electricity.

About how she could probably afford to have one of those things fixed but not both.

About how whichever she chose it might not get fixed anyway, because the guy she hired to fix it would just stand there making concerned noises, tell her she needed someone else, and charge her for the privilege.

About how she should have spent more time getting her shit together and being a proper mum instead of throwing her every spare moment at a TV cooking show like she was having a midlife crisis at twenty-seven.

Once the half hour she’d arbitrarily chosen had elapsed, Rosaline stared into her bowl for a minute or two and then—taking a deep breath—worked her dough into a rough ball as quickly as she could.

There. Done. Committed.

“Well,” Ricky was telling Colin Thrimp, “having no clue came through for me last time so here we are again. The one thing I know about bread is that you can’t be afraid to get your hands in it. So I’m giving it a good hard pounding and hoping for the best.”

Grace Forsythe patted him on the shoulder. “Man after my own heart.”

When the hour was finally up they were dismissed a little informally, probably because this section would involve one of Grace Forsythe’s plummy voice-overs and a clever edit linking it into a continuous sequence with the next. Rosaline hurried out of the ballroom and retrieved her luggage from one of the assistants.

“Look,” she said, “I know this is against the rules, but I need my phone for a bit.”

The assistant shrugged apathetically. “Sorry. It’s like Jennifer said: you’re still in the blind bake, so there’s no phones, no books, no electronic devices.”

“But I need to call my daughter.”

“You can call her tomorrow after the challenge.”

She’d sort of expected this, but that really didn’t help. “She’s eight and she’s expecting to hear from me.”

“Not my rules. Nothing I can do.”

Rosaline opened her mouth to protest but could see no world in which that wasn’t futile. She wasn’t going to get her phone back, she wasn’t going to be able to call Amelie, and then five years from now, her dad would be a dick about something and she’d make a very gentle attempt to call him on it and he’d come back with Well, what about that time you went away for the weekend and couldn’t be bothered to ring your daughter?

“You okay?” Harry, sports bag thrown casually over his shoulder, wandered over from the luggage retrieval pile.

Rosaline did not have time for this. “No. I’m not fucking okay. They won’t give me my phone and I said I’d call Amelie, but they don’t get it or don’t care, and I probably need to talk to Colin Fucking Thrimp, who I know will be useless except what else can I do?”

“Want me to come with you?” he asked, with that quiet steadiness he had that, right now, when she was anything but steady, Rosaline found quite annoying.

“Why would I want that?”

“Moral support?” he suggested. “Might be easier if you’ve got someone backing you up.”

Great. Now a random electrician thought she was incompetent as well as her parents, the boiler guy, and everybody else she knew. “I’m perfectly capable of sorting this out myself.”

He shrugged. “Didn’t say you weren’t. But there’s nothing wrong with getting help sometimes, especially when it’s something important.”

She stared at him for a long moment. Until then, she hadn’t realised how much she’d needed someone to understand that while she might not have been saving lives or making a TV show, her shit still mattered. “Okay. Fine.”

They set off in search of Colin Thrimp—and it did feel just that little bit better to have company. In some ways Harry was the perfect person because, given his reluctance to talk to people in general, she was kind of hoping he would mostly stand behind her and look . . . if not intimidating, then at least more intimidating than, say, her.

Colin Thrimp was semi-hiding in the shadow of a trailer and trying, somewhat unsuccessfully, to eat a hot dog. Onions were slipping onto his shoes.

“Oh gosh.” The dog itself followed its toppings to freedom. “Oh no. Rosaline, Harry. Can I . . . do you . . . ?”

“I want my phone back,” said Rosaline.

Colin Thrimp took a sad bite of ketchupy bread. “Ah, well. You see, we have to preserve the integrity of the round. There’s actually quite stringent broadcasting standards regulations.”