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“It’s beautiful,” she breathed.

“It is appropriate,” Mother corrected. “Turn.”

Two maids descended with pins and brushes. Pepper sat very still because she had been told to sit still, but inside she could not stop moving. The Dowager’s blithe, We shall have the tasting this evening, of course, still rang in her ears. This evening. Not next week, not even tomorrow.

It should have been a morning in the Pavilion, sleeves rolled, hands in dough. Instead Henry and the others were down there without her, facing a roomful of titled mouths and she had not finished the new schedule, had not walked Henry through Papa’s crème, had not even decided which pastries must go out first. What if they ran short? What if the sugar seized, the custards broke, the Dowager’s friends went away unimpressed and her one chance crumbled before it had properly begun?

“Miss?” one of the maids murmured as a pin pricked too close to her scalp.

Pepper dragged in a breath. Panic would not keep the ovens hot. “As soon as you’re finished, send a boy to the Pavilion,” she said, her voice coming out sharper than she meant. “He is to tell Henry that the tasting is moved to tonight, that he must keep the custards over ice and brûlée at the last possible moment. And that I trust him.” The last words were mostly for herself. She had chosen Henry; she had to believe he could carry what she could not, at least for a few hours.

In the mirror, her hair was coaxed into soft curls, then rebuilt into something elegant. The girl in the looking glass looked as though she had never run barefoot on a beach beside a man who tasted of lemon and hope.

When the last pin settled, Mother opened a small velvet box and lifted out a bracelet: a single strand of creamy pearls.

“My grandmother’s,” she said. “She wore it at her wedding. She gave it to me on my eighteenth birthday. The year I became pregnant with you. It was the last love-match in our line, so far as I know. Besides my own tragic one. Perhaps a little of it will not hurt you.”

She fastened it around Pepper’s wrist. The cool beads settled like a quiet promise.

“Why,” Pepper asked, the question escaping before she could call it back, “did you never look for him? After your parents died. After we moved. Why did you never try to find my father?”

For a heartbeat, Mother did not look formidable at all—just sad, and tired, and almost ashamed.

“Because a baker’s daughter has no chance in the ton,” she said. “I had already taken that chance. I had already wasted it. I would not make you pay twice. If I’d dragged him into this world, they would have eaten him alive. And you with him. I chose your prospects over…my comfort.”

“My father is not a man to be eaten,” Pepper said, anger sparking through the ache. “Isn’t he a part of me?”

“No, you’re a part of him and like him in more ways than I care to admit, darling.” Mother agreed quietly. “He is a man to be loved. Which is precisely why I kept him out of the game they meant to play with you. He was never cut out for the ton and I shouldn’t have dragged him as far as I did. I was young, in love, and naive enough to think the world would bend a little for me.”

Pepper thought of Chester. I don’t want the world to bend, she thought. I want Chester.

“I do not feel new at all,” she whispered. “My ankle. The doctors. The Dowager—”

Mother cupped her cheek in a brief, clumsy touch. “You are my second chance,” she said. “Even with a limp. Even with doctors who mutter. You will have choices I did not. That is all I have ever wanted for you, dear child.”

Choices. To marry a crest, or a man with bare feet and unfair opinions about flour. But I want to live as Barbara, as Pepper, or somehow both.

A knock at the door broke the moment just after the maids had served them a small lunch. “My lady? The Pavilion coach has arrived.”

Mother’s composure slid back into place. “Good. We shall be ready. Barbara, remember: no obvious limp, no politics, no arguing about flour.”

Yes, hold on to something and walk slowly to hide the limp.

Difficult when limp and flour were stitched into her bones.

“Yes, Mama,” Pepper said.

Mother stepped back, surveying her. Sea-green silk. Pearls on her wrist. Hair tamed. A duchess in the making, should the right eyes approve.

“You will do very well,” Mother said. “Smile at Wyndale. Forget his politics, they can change like the weather. His title won’t. Speak when spoken to. Think of your future.”

She did not care what they called him—Flour Duke, Wyndale, nothing at all. Titles, circulars, crests: all cloth over the shape of the man. What mattered was the one who had looked at both her halves and seen a whole.

“I will think of everything,” she said.

Mother swept out to marshal cloaks. Aunt Florence stayed just long enough to cross the room and catch Pepper’s hands.

“You look like trouble,” she whispered. “The best kind.”