My daughter-in-law unwrapped her gift at Christmas dinner and held up the apron with both hands, turning it so everyone at the table could see the embroidered text, and then she looked at me.
The apron said: Runner-Up.
I had chosen it myself.
My name is Helen Wakefield. I am sixty-seven years old. I have been making my grandmother’s honey cake at Christmas for forty-two years, and for the first thirty-eight of those years, no one at the table had suggested that the cake was anything other than the centerpiece of the celebration.
Then Marcus brought home Priya.
Priya was lovely. I say this without qualification because it was true and because the difficulty that developed between us had nothing to do with her character. She was warm and intelligent and generous and she loved my son in the specific, attentive way that made it clear she had thought carefully about who he was before deciding to love him. She was also, as it turned out, an extraordinary baker.
The first Christmas she joined us, she had arrived with a cardamom cake frosted in rose cream that she had made from a recipe passed down from her own grandmother, and it had been beautiful, and everyone at the table had exclaimed over it, and I had smiled and said it was wonderful because it was wonderful.
The second Christmas, she made it again, and someone, I believe it was my brother Edward, said: “Priya’s cake might be better than Helen’s, and I never thought I’d say that.”
He said it with the particular cheerfulness of someone who believes he is complimenting two people simultaneously and is unaware that he has just detonated something.
What happened next changed everything… FULL STORY on the next page.
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