Page 85 of The Cake Fairies
Polly covered her face with her hands, allowing the tiniest of peeps through her fingers.
Annabelle stumbled across to the sofa to join her cousin, shellshock written across her face, mercifully cancelling out the awkwardness she should be feeling around Alex. She seized Polly’s right hand in a cast iron grip that was more than welcome.
The footage switched from a collection of interviews with owners and consumers in stores to people riding on a bus.
“I’m here on the Park and Ride that takes passengers from the outskirts of Peasedown St. John in North Somerset right into the heart of beautiful Bath… and I’m almost speechless,” the female reporter announced with a giant grin. “A quick look around this rush hour double decker and you will see thatnobodyis on their iPad, headphones, or devices… not even the groups of teenage school kids at the back. The phenomenon is real, all right. This isn’t just rumour, neither is it something exclusive to the confines of London.”
The presenter turned to her right to interview a beaming elderly couple – although they were probably younger than Polly and Annabelle in their true 2020 years.
“We think it’s marvellous. Who cares how it’s happened?” Mary Hippisley’s name flashed across the bottom of the screen. “Now we can have conversations with our great nieces and nephews without them getting sucked into their screens, fingers and thumbs tap-tapping away.”
“Pfft. Their parents are just as bad… well,werejust as bad!” her husband interjected, the white Times New Roman font at the bottom of the screen telling the Cake Fairies that this opinion came courtesy of a gentleman named Harry.
Alex had collated a monumental montage of news, and it didn’t stop there: from train stations to airport departure lounges, doctors waiting rooms to park benches, cafes, restaurants and bars to skateboarding parks. No stone had been left unturned in his documentation.
“I cut out some newspaper clippings too. It turned into a bit of a second career.”
He tossed the words over his shoulder before returning his attention to the real-time scenes outside; evidently sensing he should leave the women to digest the enormity of things.
Indeed, for several minutes all Polly and Annabelle could do was to sit in silence, unable even to look at each other.
“We did this?” Polly ventured.
“We did this.”
“You’re sure?”
“How else could it happen? Bloody hell,” Annabelle started then stopped. “We’ve only been and created utopia.”
“What now?”
“He did all of this for you,” Annabelle lowered her voice to a whisper. “I can’t believe you’re even asking that.”
“He did it forus.”
Polly watched as Alex shifted from window loiter to kitchen.
“He never stopped hoping you’d return, Polly,” she said, fire in her eyes.
Tears pricked at Polly’s. This was too much. On a similar level to the whole goddamn adventure in the first place, but way too much to ever comprehend. She was a nobody. The owner of a single bakery in a village nobody had even heard of, soon to return there to certain perpetual singledom.
“You’re a Cake Fairy, my darling. You knew you were making a difference. This is your second chance. He might not be waiting in the same room. But heiswaiting in the room next door. It’s also yourlastchance. Take it before he goes back to Denmark and puts a whole country between you as well.”
“But he’s seeing somebody else… and… in any case, we’re time travellers,” she gasped. It still felt strange to admit it. “Even if he wasn’t attached, it’s not like I can take him back with me… or like Amber Magnolia will let me stay here to see how things might pan out.”
“Methinks somebody needs to get their facts straight!”
A jet-black bob swished around the door, causing them both to shriek, and then delayed reaction shriek again. At which point Ivy couldn’t resist adding a farcical shriek of her own. Thank God the food mixer was going full pelt in the kitchen, Alex clearly feeling the call of cake. Polly granted herself a brief smile at the way he felt so at home in her home.
Okay, her home from home.
But what a bugger that she still hadn’t properly closed the front door, caught up as she was in all the shock: her inadvertent open house party had just been and spilled one too many beans…
“What do you mean?” Polly murmured pointlessly, heart thudding at the realisation she’d laid bare both her soul and their whopping great guilty secret.
“Turns out Taz has held a vicious grudge against him since the day he started at The Toadstool. Jealousy, innit? Alex’s cakes sell out ten times faster, hence Taz being demoted and spending most of his day brewing coffee now instead.”
“Of course,” Polly repeated, as would any parrot who’d been given her name. “I thought his body language was a bit off kilter. Yes, of course!”
