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Before I can respond to Georgie’s career pivot into horror hosting, a voice cuts through the crowd.

“Bizzy!”

Emmie Crosby Granger materializes through the festival chaos balancing a tray of black-cat cupcakes—dark chocolate with swirls of purple buttercream, candy eyes, and tiny fondant ears—and the sight of my best friend settles something inside me.

“Ooh, sorry.” She winces at the sleepy cowgirl princess in my arms and blows her a kiss.

Emmie has donned a witch hat at an odd angle and has a smear of something chocolatey on her left sleeve that tells me quality control has been rigorous.

Mom and Georgie converge on the tray with alarming efficiency.

“These are obscene,” Georgie announces around a mouthful of cupcake.

“Thank you.” Emmie laughs. “That’s exactly what I was going for.”

Emmie runs the Country Cottage Café out of the inn’s kitchen and is, without question, the reason our guests check in for a weekend and stay for a week. We share the same long dark hair and the same denim blue eyes, and we’ve been inseparable since preschool. She knows I can read minds and has never once made it weird. She’s also incapable of producing a bad dessert. In other words, she’s the perfect best friend.

She leans my way. “I have to tell you, your dessert display is absolutely gorgeous. I’ve watched three people stop just to take pictures.”

“You mean your dessert display. The closest I came to baking was wandering into the kitchen every fifteen minutes asking if anything needed tasting.”

“That’s not true. You came up with the tombstone cookies.”

“I came up with the words on the tombstones. You baked them, decorated them, and made them look adorable. I contributed death puns.”

She laughs. “You also insisted one of them needed to say Here Lies My Diet.”

“And I stand by my contribution.”

“And you ate all three of my samples before I’d even finished decorating.”

“I was making sure the icing held up under pressure.”

“Pressure?”

“If a cookie can’t survive me, it has no business meeting the public.”

Emmie gives a solemn nod. “Thank goodness you were here to save lives.”

“I take food safety very seriously,” I say with a wink.

Near the stage, the Scream Queens dessert table is doing its level best to out-Halloween the rest of the festival. Black lace, orange burlap, silver candelabras, chalkboard menus, and enough sugar to keep Spider Cove awake until Thanksgiving. A Bizzy’s Bites banner hangs over the whole thing.

I didn’t authorize the banner.

I’m also not taking it down.

Tomorrow is the tombstone cookie bar for one of the headline panels, but tonight we’re sticking with the festival theme—caramel apple bites, cider donuts, and a candy corn charcuterie board that Emmie and I spent two hours debating and another four hours assembling.

And by assembling, I mean eating our way through the inventory and periodically rearranging what survived.

I can’t help it. Unlike ninety-nine percent of the population, I happen to like candy corn. I’d even go so far as to call it a seasonal vegetable. It has corn right there in the name, and frankly, that’s all the nutritional research I’m willing to do.

“I love this for us,” Emmie says. “Speaking of things I love, we need to schedule a Halloween craft playdate for our little cutie pies this week. This is their first real Halloween where they’re actually going to be awake for it. I want to make it special. Pumpkin painting, maybe. Elliot can eat the paint while Ella supervises.”

I laugh. “Perfect. They’ve already established their roles. Ella points, Elliot obeys, and anything marked not for human consumption becomes a personal challenge.”

“It sounds a lot like my marriage.”