“But what if it changes who you are? Or people don’t understand.”

Rosaline didn’t consider herself the least neurotic person she’d ever met, but this seemed conservative even by the nice middle-class standards she was accustomed to falling short of. “It’s just a tattoo. No one has to know about it.”

“I’ll know.”

“Then it’ll remind you of who you were in a different time, and that can be nice. I mean, it can be sad, too, sometimes. But I like remembering I can be the sort of person who does something because she wants to and does it all the way.”

“I think,” said Liv softly, “I’m beginning to understand what Alain sees in you.”

“Um. Thanks?”

She had a nonspecifically wistful look. “I wish I could be more like that.”

This was beginning to make Rosaline feel depressingly hypocritey. Because, while she could be like that, she mostly wasn’t. After all, being a sexy butterfly who went where the wind took her wouldn’t have created an environment she wanted her daughter to grow up in. Or maybe she was still like that, but like that looked different now. When she’d been seventeen, she’d wanted to get a tattoo and to get laid, and she’d got both. Now she was twenty-seven, she wanted to provide for her daughter, show the nation she made nice cakes, and, um, get laid. And wasn’t she, in her own way, working on all three? It was just that they took a bit longer than a trip to a tattoo parlour or a quickie in Lauren’s room before her mum got home.

“It’s not magic,” Rosaline said, “and I’m not special. If you want to do things, you can do them. And if you don’t, that’s okay as well. Not everyone needs a tattoo.”

There was a thoughtful silence.

“Why don’t I”—Alain rose—“get us another round.”

Despite the setting and a shaky start, the evening wasn’t going as badly as Rosaline had feared. Even so, with Liv’s slightly too-interested gaze upon her, she very much welcomed the cushion of another drink.

Saturday

“HELLO,” BOOMED GRACE Forsythe, “good morning, and welcome, my fabulous, flaky final five.”

A pause so the cameras could gather shots of them looking bashfully pleased to have made it this far and adorably apprehensive of what was to come.

“This time you’re in Marianne’s hands because we’re about to delve into the intricate world of madeleines and meringues, macarons and mille-feuille, pièce montée and Paris-Brest. That’s right, it’s patisserie week.”

Marianne Wolvercote prowled forward, looking especially in need of a cigarette holder. “Today’s blind bake is a savoury recipe that requires a delicate touch, a mastery of choux pastry—”

“And a willingness,” added Grace Forsythe, “to be just a little bit cheesy.”

“I want you,” continued Marianne Wolvercote, “to make twenty-eight perfectly formed, identical gougères. They’re a personal favourite, so don’t disappoint me.”

Grace Forsythe bounced on the balls of her feet. “You have one hour. On the count of three. Three, darlings.”

Okay, this could have been a lot worse. Rosaline had been worried they’d ask her to make something fiddly with layers, and she’d never done well at fiddly with layers. There were always so many elements that one of them was bound to go wrong—especially with time pressure—and there she’d be with a runny crème pat or fruit in the wrong place and Marianne Wolvercote saying something like, “This lacks both joy and finesse.”

Anyway. Her joyless pudding was in the past. Her future lay in making twenty-eight cheesy buns from a recipe that she knew, without even looking at it, would start with the line “Make choux pastry.”

“Preheat oven to a high temperature,” said the recipe.

Dammit.

“Make choux pastry,” it continued.

Ha.

Rosaline awarded herself an A-minus for effort. And got on with the choux.

It wasn’t anybody’s favourite pastry because it was tricky to work with and the bake-verse was filled with weird myths about how you knew it was cooked properly. But she and Amelie had tried to make profiteroles once, and while the bake had gone horrendously badly, they’d had a lot of fun with the piping bags and eaten left-over crème pat straight from the spoon.

Once the dough started pulling away from the sides of the pan, Rosaline plopped it into a bowl and tried to remember what you did with the eggs.

“I’m trying to remember,” she told a hovering camera without being prompted, “what you do with the eggs. I think if you put them in while it’s too hot, they’ll cook and then you’re making . . . scrambled egg buns. When I made choux with my daughter, we squished it until it cooled, but honestly, that might just be because she likes squishing things, and I think that did overagitate the dough. And I definitely don’t want my choux to be agitated. I want it to be”—she was doing hand gestures again—“mellow and friendly. The kind of dough you could go for a drink with.”

Rosaline prodded tentatively at her choux-to-be. It was not exactly hot but not exactly cool, and she had no idea what that meant, so she decided to wait before chucking eggs in it. And somehow, waiting and trusting her instincts had stopped being the most terrifying thing in the universe.

It seemed impossible, but had she actually got used to the ballroom? It still didn’t feel like her own kitchen because it was a giant oak-panelled room in a stately home full of TV cameras, but her workstation had grown familiar to her as the weeks had passed. As had the other contestants: Nora with her incessant narration, Alain with his obsessive focus, Anvita’s tendency towards chaos, and Harry’s painstaking care that sometimes disintegrated into paralysis.

And in two weeks it would all be over. Or one week. Or, if things went very badly, zero weeks. It was probably a bit late in the game to work out that she’d miss it. The place and the people and even the challenges. Because even when she fucked them up abominably and made a leche that wouldn’t dulce or a joyless pudding, she was still baking. And she loved baking and the show made that okay.

Made it into something that millions of people shared and appreciated and celebrated.

Instead of something she did because she couldn’t be a doctor.