Chapter 15 — Ivy's Little Scheme

POV: BEATRIX

A few days passed after the terrace. Quiet ones, mostly. Good ones.

Nobody brought up the terrace directly. We didn't need to. It was there anyway, in the small things.

The way he handed me the coffee before I asked for it now. The way I stopped flinching when he stood close.

Nikolai had started leaving for work a little later some mornings. He probably didn't even notice he was doing it. I noticed.

Ivy had stopped knocking before climbing into whatever room we were in, as if she'd finally decided we counted as hers too. Even the staff seemed a little more relaxed, less careful with their footsteps around the two of us, as though the house itself had exhaled.

I was halfway through my coffee on Tuesday morning when Ivy came into the kitchen already dressed for school, holding her tablet out in front of her like a shield, and announced, without any warning, that we were competing in a cooking show.

"It's called the Parent-Daughter Cook-Off," she said. "It's on Channel 4. Live. In ten days. I already signed us up."

"Team Ashcombe," she added, like that settled the matter completely. "There's a trophy. And a real television host. His name is Chef Marco. He was on that show about cupcakes."

Nikolai looked up from his newspaper very slowly, the way he did when something at the office had gone badly wrong.

"You signed us up."

"Well, technically, I signed Team Ashcombe up. It just happens to be us."

"How, exactly, does an eight-year-old sign a family up for a live television competition?"

"I used your assistant's email. She has the same password saved on the family tablet as everything else, so it was pretty easy."

I choked a little on my own coffee. "A cooking show," I repeated, mostly to give myself time to catch up. "Live. On television. In ten days."

"Yes," Ivy said, like I was being slow on purpose.

"Ivy." Nikolai set the cup down completely, his voice slipping into the flat, careful tone he used when he was trying very hard not to raise it. "You can't just enter people into a live television competition without asking them first."

"I know," she said, not sounding sorry at all. "I did it anyway."

I said it the way I said most things at the office: final and flat, already moving on to whatever came next in my head, though it took me a second to realize that thought belonged to Nikolai and not to me. "We are not doing this."

Her face fell.

It happened fast, but I saw it clearly—the exact same drop I'd watched the night of her nightmare, right before she'd started crying for a mother who wasn't there.

Her chin dipped. Her shoulders drew in. For one second, she looked like a much smaller kid than the one who'd marched in here five minutes ago holding a tablet like a battle plan.

Nikolai saw it too. I watched it land on him, watched something behind his eyes shift the moment her face changed.

"It's for charity," Ivy said quietly, staring down at the table instead of either of us. "The money goes to the children's hospital. I thought it would be nice. I thought maybe you'd want to do something nice on television for once instead of just business stuff."

She said it so quietly I almost didn't hear her. It sounded like she'd been holding onto that hope for longer than just this morning. I glanced at Nikolai. Whatever he'd been about to say next, the fight had already left it.

The kitchen went very quiet. I looked back and forth between the two of them, my husband and his daughter, both waiting to see who would move first, and had the strange thought that I was watching a decision being made that had nothing to do with cooking at all.

****

POV: NIKOLAI

I have said no to a great many things in my life without hesitating for even a second. Board proposals. Merger terms. A marriage, once, to a woman my father picked out for me before I turned twenty-five.

I have built an entire career on the ability to say it without flinching, to people far more powerful than an eight-year-old with a tablet. No has never been a difficult word for me.

I said it in five languages to men who controlled entire industries and never lost sleep over it afterward.

It became considerably harder to say as I watched my daughter's face fall in exactly the same way it had that night I stood in her doorway, with no idea how to help her.

I remembered that same expression from her doorway weeks ago, the same small shoulders curling inward, and felt something in my own chest tighten in response before I had even decided to feel anything at all.

I do not enjoy being filmed while doing things I am bad at. I do not enjoy crowds, cameras, or the particular humiliation of failing in public, where a headline can be written about it by lunchtime.

Arthur never let me near a kitchen growing up. Kitchens were for staff, he used to say, not for men who were meant to be running things. I had never once questioned that until this exact moment, standing in my own kitchen and being asked to do the opposite.

Every instinct I have built over the last fifteen years told me to say no again, firmly, and get on with the rest of the morning. I could already picture the headline:

Ashcombe Fumbles Family Cook-Off. I could picture my board reading it over coffee, wondering whether the man handling their stadium deal could be trusted to hold a whisk without incident.

Worse, I could picture Beatrix's face if I said no twice in one morning to a daughter who had clearly worked up the courage to ask for something for once instead of simply expecting to be told no.

I looked at Ivy instead. At the way she'd gone quiet and small, bracing for the answer she'd clearly already decided I was going to give her.

"Ten days," I said slowly.

Ivy lifted her head.

"I have never cooked anything in my life," I said. "Not once. I do not know how to use half the appliances in that kitchen."

"That's what practice is for," Ivy said, with some hope creeping back into her voice.

"Practice. In ten days."

"People learn things in ten days all the time.Not usually things involving live television and open flame."

"You'll have me," Ivy said, like that settled everything. "I already know how to crack an egg. I watched a video."

I looked at Beatrix. She was watching the whole exchange with an expression somewhere between amusement and pity, the look of someone who already knew exactly how this would end and was waiting for me to catch up.

I thought about the headline again. Then I thought about the alternative: saying no a second time and watching that same small, defeated look settle back over her face for the rest of the week. In the end, it was not a difficult decision.

"Fine," I said. "We'll do it."

Ivy's whole face lit up.

"On one condition," I added, before she could start celebrating too loudly. "Beatrix keeps me from humiliating myself on live television. I mean that. If I am about to do something that will end up as a headline, she stops me."

"Deal," Ivy said immediately, like she'd have agreed to nearly anything at that point.

"I'm serious, Ivy. This is not a small ask. I need real coaching."

"I said deal, Daddy." She said it exactly the way I imagine I sound in negotiations, final, already three steps past the point of discussion—and I found myself wondering, not for the first time, where exactly she'd learned to talk like that.

Beatrix laughed, and the sound eased something in my chest, breaking the morning's tension at last. "I'll do my best," she said. "No promises about the flour."

"What flour?"

"You'll see."

Something about the way she said it made me distinctly nervous, though I could not have explained why a woman warning me about flour should seem like a threat.

I did not have time to ask what that meant, because Ivy was already sliding off her chair, victory apparently secured. She was done with breakfast and moving on to the rest of her morning, like the negotiation had never been in doubt.

She grabbed her school bag off the counter, and as she turned toward the door, I caught it—quick and small, easy to miss if I hadn't been looking at exactly the right moment.

Under the table, hidden from anyone who wasn't watching for it, my eight-year-old daughter pumped her fist.

I sat there for a long moment after she'd gone, slowly turning my coffee cup in my hands, and thought that I had just been outmaneuvered, cleanly and completely, by a child who had not even finished the third grade.

I found, somewhat to my own surprise, that I did not mind losing nearly as much as I had expected.

Ten days was not very long to learn how not to embarrass myself on national television. It was, I decided, exactly long enough to try.

I finished my coffee, already dreading it and looking forward to it in roughly equal measure, and went to find Beatrix to ask, seriously this time, what she meant about the flour.

Somewhere down the hall, I could still hear Ivy humming to herself, pleased with the entire morning in the way only a child who has just won something can be.