All the Little Pieces. Jilliane Hoffman

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СКАЧАТЬ and the BFF roles rotated positions once again. That was when the idea of Sweet Sisters was first conceived – during a ladies’ night out to celebrate Vivian’s purchase of a home a mile away from Faith’s in Parkland. Too many martinis later, it didn’t seem like such a silly idea to start a cupcakery. Two months later, when both of them were perfectly sober, they’d found the perfect location, signed a lease and started the build-out. Today they had a healthy Internet business and were looking at expanding with another store in Fort Lauderdale. The notion of franchising was no longer a pipedream – they both joked about someday giving Starbucks a run for its money. Faith sometimes felt bad that the idea for Sweet Sisters had come to her when the BFF positions had switched. Charity’s financial situation wouldn’t have let her be a partner, but she might’ve been able to participate in the business in other ways, and maybe her life would be different right now. Maybe she’d stayed with Nick and put up with his shit because she didn’t want to be a single mom and the odd man out in Coral Springs.

      Faith closed the door behind her and went to her desk, trying to push all thoughts of her sister from her head. Right now she didn’t want to have pity for Charity, in any way shape or form. But there, stuck to her computer screen, was a note from Vivian: Charity called AGAIN. She has your phone??? And purse?? She said to tell you she’s sorry for being a bitch? Can’t wait to hear this one! That explains why you’re not answering your phone, I guess …

      Faith’s eyes welled at the memory of her sister standing hand in hand with Nick, watching with the crowd as she wrestled a crying, screaming, freaking-out Maggie into the car in the pouring rain. She wanted to tell Vivian what had happened, but then the rest of the night rushed into the mortifying memory. Leading the charge was the haunting, pale face of that girl. The thick, glue feeling in her stomach was back. And she knew she couldn’t tell her best friend that part. She couldn’t tell anyone that part. Ever.

       Work. Bury yourself in a project. The fervent need to get this off your chest will pass. That girl is OK. Maggie is OK. Everything will be OK.

      She wiped the tears before they fell, sat down at her desk and pulled out the file of purchase orders. After that was the ad copy she needed to write for the Sun-Sentinel and the application she had to finish for Cupcake Wars – the Food Network baking competition show that she was trying to get Sweet Sisters on. And finally, payroll. That should keep her in the office and her mind busy until the Explorer was ready. There was no way she could talk to Charity today without losing it – either breaking down in tears or screaming like a lunatic at her. It wasn’t going to be a quiet conversation, no matter what. While Faith verbally wanted to blame her accident and dented car on her sister, and shift some of the guilt she was feeling onto her shoulders, she didn’t want anyone to know what had happened last night after she’d left the party – what she had done. Or, more accurately, what she hadn’t.

      She tapped her fingers anxiously on the desk phone and thought again about calling the police. But what good would that do now? Time had kept ticking on. Those characters, that girl, were long gone. Questions would still be asked by the police that she still didn’t have the answers to. And while she’d pass a breathalyzer for sure now, her car was sitting in a repair shop. How would that look? She’d have to explain the accident to Jarrod. And now the cover-up of the accident. Once again, she pulled her hand off the phone. Charity had been so wasted last night, so damn wasted – now she wanted to apologize? All that had happened had happened for no reason? The thought made her so angry her hands shook. Perhaps the best way to handle her sister would be to send her a text from Vivian’s phone cordially telling her to please mail the purse and cell back – that she would even send her a check for the postage. Leave it at that. Leave their whole relationship at that. What made her even more upset was knowing that Charity was likely apologizing because Nick was back to being an ass this morning and she wanted to go back to complaining about him and her life. Just hit the reset button and all is forgiven. It’s business as usual. Faith looked around the office that, like her home, looked the same as she’d left it on Saturday, but was somehow totally different. Not today it’s not, Charity. Life might never be usual ever again. On the other side of the wall she could hear the bakers laughing and kidding around with each other. She envied the simplicity of their conversation.

      A graduate of the College of Journalism at UF, owning a cupcake bakery was the last thing in the world Faith Saunders would ever have imagined herself doing. She might have fond memories of helping Grandma Milly bake cookies at Christmas, but stirring the batter, pouring in the chips and testing the dough was about the extent of what her grandma ever let her do. Hence, she was lacking some serious culinary skills after Grandma Milly left for, as she called it, ‘the big dog park in the sky’ – reunited for eternity with the dozens of Boston terriers she’d raised over her eighty years. Faith certainly hadn’t learned anything in the kitchen from her mother, Aileen, who couldn’t boil water and hadn’t inherited her own mother’s fondness for baking; cracking open a roll of Nestlé Toll House was asking too much. It was Faith’s dad who’d taught Faith the basics so she could survive and snag herself a husband. Patrick ‘Sully’ Sullivan was a closet cook. By the time Faith graduated high school she could grill meat, roast potatoes, and make pasta. As for dessert, Sully was off-the-boat Irish – he finished off his meals with a Jameson twelve-year-old – so Faith had never had any experience in baking confections. Dessert usually meant peeling the lid off a pint of Ben & Jerry’s or defrosting a Sara Lee cheesecake.

      Jarrod had thought she was still drunk the morning after that ladies’ night out when she told him about her and Vivian’s plans to abandon a stalled writing career and a fledgling accounting practice to become bakers. It’d taken her a few weeks and continuous tries with various recipes in the kitchen to convince him she was serious. But when he came around to the idea, he’d embraced it. He was the one who’d actually found the former Payless shoe store property in a strip mall in Coral Springs. And he had been able to negotiate a good chunk of the build-out into the lease, which made the project less financially daunting.

      Initially, the plan upon graduation had been to take her journalism degree and become the next Edna Buchanan at some hotshot publication, then use all the fascinating stories she’d reported on as inspiration for the crime fiction novels she was going to write from her and Jarrod’s hip Manhattan apartment, as he worked his way up the ladder of some fancy New York law firm. But as Steinbeck once noted, the best-laid plans often went astray, awry or up in smoke: the hotshot publications weren’t hiring and Jarrod had decided to go with the Public Defender’s Office in Miami. Time was gone and New York was out. Faith had waited tables at night and managed a kiosk at the Aventura mall that first year out of school, sending out résumé after résumé, feeling beyond dejected when the phone didn’t ring. When the managing editor of the monthly South Florida magazine, Gold Coast, offered her a part-time position as a features writer she’d jumped on it, happy to finally be working in her field and hoping to build her résumé so when the market rebounded and the hotshot publications opened their online doors she’d get to do what she thought she’d always wanted to be doing: investigative reporting.

      And then she got pregnant.

      It had now been eight years since Pomp and Circumstance had ushered her out of Gainesville and into the real world. She’d missed her midterms at UF because of the DUI, and for months after that it was impossible for her to concentrate on anything. It had taken her an extra year to graduate and cost her a small fortune when she lost her Bright Futures scholarship and had to take out student loans to finish up. Of course, she’d ended up meeting Jarrod that extra year, so some amazing good did come out of God-awful horrible. In between researching and writing compelling articles for Gold Coast that questioned whether the South Florida art scene was suffering from a dearth of true artists, she’d managed to fire off a few chapters of a manuscript that was currently residing in the bottom of a desk drawer. But that’s all she had accomplished of the original plan: a few chapters. She’d had a baby, yes, and that was definitely an achievement, but the fantastic ideas for a fantastic thriller had never come СКАЧАТЬ