Chapter 1 - Pick Up the Pieces

My stepmother crushed my dead mother's Christmas house beneath her heel, looked me straight in the eye, and said, "Pick it up before the guests arrive."

For a second, I couldn't move.

The little gingerbread bakery lay in pieces across my father's living-room floor. Its candy windows were shattered. The icing letters spelling BELL & FLOUR had broken in half. A tiny red door, the one my mother always insisted on making crooked, had landed beside my shoe.

"Tessa." Corinne snapped her fingers. "Did you hear me?"

"You did that on purpose."

She smiled in her emerald Christmas sweater. "You knocked the table. Don't make another scene."

"I wasn't anywhere near the table."

"And now you're arguing." She picked up her phone. "Your dad is going to be so disappointed."

I had come home to Briar Glen after four years in Pittsburgh because Dad said the bakery needed help. I'd spent the past eleven nights rebuilding Mom's Christmas display from her handwritten recipe cards. Corinne had spent those same eleven days announcing how generously she'd welcomed me back.

Now she was standing over me while I knelt to rescue a sugar window from the floor.

"Careful," she said, looking toward the doorway. "You'll make yourself look unstable again."

That word hit harder than the destruction. After Mom died, I'd gone to counseling. Corinne had turned those appointments into a family joke, then into a warning she repeated whenever I disagreed with her.

The back door opened. Grandma June walked in carrying a paper grocery bag.

She saw me on the floor. She saw Corinne's spotless shoes. She saw the ruined house.

"What happened?" Grandma asked.

"Tessa had an episode," Corinne answered smoothly.

Grandma set the bag on the counter. "No. I asked what happened."

"She knocked over the display."

Grandma studied the broken table leg, then looked at Corinne. At seventy-eight, she moved slowly. Her voice never did.

"Funny," she said. "Because I came here to ask you a different question."

Corinne's smile tightened. "About what?"

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"Why was your car behind the bakery at two fourteen this morning?"

The room went still. Then Grandma added, "And why did you take the old steel cash box out with you?"