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the door, fighting tears, fighting nausea. Now, in addition to thinking she was a lying, selfish rich bitch, he also thought her a slut. People were always labeling her something or another based on stereotypes. She shouldn’t care.
    She cared.
    Don’t cry. Don’t cry
.
    Luke knocked on the door.
    Rae turned on the shower.
    When at long last the outer door finally opened and shut, Rae cried.

FOUR
    Six weeks later …
    Sugar Creek, Vermont
    “Ah, come on. They can’t be that bad.”
    “No offense, Luke, but these are quite possibly the worst cupcakes I’ve ever tasted.”
    Luke raised a brow at his sister’s blunt assessment of his chocolate cupcakes. Rocky always shot straight from the hip. Usually he liked that about her. But not right now. A little encouragement would be nice.
    “I don’t know about the worst,” Chloe said. Although she was still grimacing after swallowing.
    “Don’t sugarcoat it, kitten,” Daisy said. “He’ll never learn if you do.”
    “I’m not sure he
can
learn.” This from Ethel Larsen, one of the senior members of the Cupcake Lovers and one of Daisy’s closest friends. “Luke, honey. Just because your grandma, sister, and cousin have a gift for baking, that doesn’t mean you automatically do.”
    “Sam’s the one who told me to get a hobby,” Luke reminded them. Apparently, Luke had been driving his friends and family crazy for several weeks. Not on purpose, but he was bored. He wasn’t dating anyone and he didn’t like being alone. He could only work so many hours at the Sugar Shack, so he’d been volunteering to help folks with various projects or trying to rope them into social activities. When Sam had suggested Luke take up a hobby, Sam had been on his way to the weekly Cupcake Lovers meeting and Luke had thought,
what the hell.
He’d been working hard to mend bridges with Sam, and maybe they could man-bond over man cakes.
    Casey Monahan, part of the younger set of this club, regarded Luke with strained patience. “If Sam were here tonight, I’m sure he’d tell you he was thinking of a hobby along the lines of a poker club or bowling team.”
    “You know we love you,” Monica said, “but this is your third meeting, Luke. The third batch of cupcakes you’ve shared with us and every batch has been worse than the one before.”
    “Who substitutes maple syrup for vegetable oil?” Casey asked.
    He’d been out of oil so he’d improvised. That’s what he did when he mixed drinks and it usually worked. “The consistency seemed right,” Luke said in his defense.
    Daisy thunked her hand to her forehead.
    Luke frowned. He couldn’t even count on his own grandma to defend him. He looked at the women seated around Dev and Chloe’s dining room table. He’d known all of them, with the exception of Chloe and Monica (transplants from the Midwest) all of his life. The Cupcake Lovers had been around since World War II. They were presently in the process of having their very own recipe and memoir book published—which was sort of exciting if you asked Luke. Baking was out of his realm, but he liked the social aspect of the club and the charitable causes. Plus, he liked cupcakes. He’d been eating a lot of them lately. Just not his own.
    “Listen. Just tell me where I went wrong here.” He gestured to their plates and his barely sampled cupcakes. “You told me to keep it simple. I did. Plain ol’ chocolate as opposed to the Chocolate Cherry Cola with Red Licorice or the Spicy Double Dark Chocolate.”
    “Someone who’s never baked before shouldn’t be getting their recipes from
Cupcake Wars,
” Judy said.
    Since the Cupcake Lovers prided themselves on unique cupcakes, that TV baking show had seemed like the perfect source to Luke. Also it was easier and faster to watch and listen than to search a printed book or the Internet. But, whatever.
    “This one came straight from a cookbook I checked out of the library,” he said. “Monica helped me pick out the