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That, she now understood with a small, fierce start, was what she wanted with Chester.

Not someday or in theory.

Now.

And she realized she could hardly wait to find out whether he wanted it, too.

If he closes his eyes at the first spoonful—if he hears the sugar crack and looks for her—then perhaps Papa had been right to call it a recipe for love.

A clank woke her from her woolgathering.

Henry stood like a general before his troops: three dozen ramekins in precise ranks on the scrubbed table, each holding a custard set to a faint, promising wobble, all poured from that dawn-made cream.

“Not one crack,” he muttered, bending to look along the row. “If any of you break on the road, I will haunt you.”

Brigitte hovered with a bowl of sugar, the grains fine as frost. Mrs. Hart, spectacles low on her nose, had the ledger open and was counting under her breath—eggs, cream, coin—as if the sum of them could somehow be converted into courage.

Against the far wall, Mrs. Hart’s prize hummed with low heat: the new iron cooking apparatus they had coaxed into the Brighton kitchen in pieces and reassembled like smugglers. A squat boiler held shallow pans over steady steam; above it, a narrow hot cupboard sat like a watchful cat, keeping dishes warm without letting them spoil. One small fire, three kinds of work.

It felt, to Pepper, like a brilliant invention built from smoke and iron—and the only thing in the house as double-lived as she was.

She moved between table and stove with the measured rhythm her body knew without thinking, lifting lids to let just enough steam escape, checking every ramekin. Tap at the edge of the pot with her wooden spoon. Perfect tremble. Tap. Nearly ready. Each faint quiver felt like the echo of her own chest.

“Caramel at the Pavilion only,” Henry reminded her. “We brûlée on site or not at all.”

She sighed. “I know,” she said. “If we brûlée now, the sugar will go soft on the road.”

“Sugar always goes soft,” he sniffed. “It’s like a woman. It requires attention at the last possible moment.”

Pepper almost laughed—and then the swing door creaked as it opened.

Aunt Florence slid in sideways in a manner of sneaking into a play halfway through the second act, shawl clutched in one hand. She took one look at the ordered chaos and sighed.

“There you are, my love,” she said. “Your mother has sent up the signal flags. She wants you in the front parlor. Immediately.” Her eyes flicked to Mrs. Hart. “She has already dispatched one maid in an effort to find you. I volunteered to save the kitchen from invasion.”

Pepper’s stomach dipped. “Now?” she asked, though she knew the answer.

“Now,” Aunt Florence said ruefully. “She is in the sort of mood where ‘in a moment’ sounds like rebellion.”

Mrs. Hart did not look up from her ledger. “Your mother in the kitchen,” she said, “would be a catastrophe. Go, Pepper. We’ll mind the custards.”

Henry flapped a hand without looking up. “Vas-y. We guard them with our lives.”

Pepper unknotted her apron, heart thumping like an over-beaten egg. “Do not let Henry haunt anything,” she told Brigitte. “And if any ramekin so much as thinks about cracking, turn it to the wall so it cannot upset the others.”

Brigitte giggled. Henry sniffed. Mrs. Hart gave Pepper’s hand a quick, firm squeeze as she passed—a tiny, wordless blessing over the girl who was carrying their work and her own heart into uncertain territory.

Pepper smoothed her apron once, trying to press her two selves flat and tidy, then untied it and hung it on its hook.

Front of the house, she thought. Silk world. Lady Barbara’s world.

Pepper turned her back on the heat and the copper and stepped through the door into the cooler air of the hall, where the scent of sugar gave way to beeswax and lavender and the rustle of a life that did not quite know what she was risking for it.

The swing door swallowed her into the other half of the house.

Butter and steam dropped away. The polished corridor did not forgive uneven steps the way kitchen flagstones did because the slipperier the surface, the more careful Pepper had to be; the runner wanted to slide treacherously beneath her feet. Pepper adjusted and willed her ankle into obedience.

The parlor waited like a judgement.