The afternoon light had shifted, slipping from a pale gold into the kind of warmth that made the kitchen glow. It caught on the metal edge of the mixing bowls stacked by the sink and glimmered faintly against the glossy tops of cooling cupcakes. The air still carried the faint trace of laughter from earlier — easy and unhurried, the kind that left behind a soft quiet rather than a hollow one.
The oven timer broke that silence with a sharp ding, and Isla, who had been half-melted into the couch, moved automatically. She brushed her hair out of her face, tied her apron strings tighter, and crossed to the counter with practiced ease. Behind her, Callie didn't move an inch.
"That's your second batch today," Callie said, curled into the corner of the sofa, legs tucked under her like a cat. "You starting an army?"
"Therapy," Isla answered automatically, though her voice came out softer than teasing. She reached for her oven mitts draped over the counter and opened the oven door. Heat bloomed outward, carrying the scent of vanilla and sugar — a comfort that wrapped around the room like a memory.
"Smells like overachieving," Callie said, peering toward the kitchen.
"Smells like coping," Isla countered, pulling the tray free and setting it on the counter. The cupcakes were pale gold, the tops puffed and domed, the kind of perfect she hadn't aimed for but got anyway.
She removed the mitts, and began clearing space — half her mind on the cupcakes, the other half on keeping her kitchen from descending into chaos again. A few crumbs brushed aside, spatula rinsed, mixing bowls nested one inside the other. Her motions were habitual, the kind that could almost convince her things were fine.
The kitchen hummed quietly. A flicker of life after the storm.
Callie had migrated from lounging to half-lying on the couch, phone angled above her face like a lazy halo. Her thumb scrolled in slow, aimless circles — the kind of browsing that wasn't really searching for anything. Every few seconds, she took another absent bite from a cupcake she'd stolen off the cooling rack.
"These should come with a warning label," she said, licking a dot of frosting off her thumb. "I've had three."
"Four," Isla corrected without turning around. She was rinsing the mixing bowl, her sleeve pushed up to the elbow, hair escaping from her bun in fine, frizzy strands. "And if you get sugar poisoning, I'm not responsible."
"Worth it," Callie mumbled through another bite.
The sound of running water filled the room — soft, steady, domestic. Isla wiped her hands on a dish towel, half-smiling to herself. For all of Callie's dramatics, her presence made the house feel less like it was waiting for the next disaster.
Callie had gone quiet for a moment, thumb still busy with scrolling. Then a sound slipped out — "Huh."
That sound — huh — immediately set off a low alarm in Isla's brain.
She glanced over, brows pinching slightly. "What now?"
Callie didn't answer right away. Her expression had shifted — eyes narrowed, thumb frozen above the screen. "Well..." she said after a beat, voice dipping into that tone Isla had learned to distrust. "This says a lot."
Isla turned off the tap, shaking the excess water from her hands before reaching for the dish towel. The look on Callie's face was enough to make her hesitate.
"Please don't tell me there's another hashtag," Isla said, rounding the breakfast bar and leaning her weight against the edge.
"Not a new one," Callie said, still studying her phone. "Just... a new angle."
She turned the screen toward Isla.
The light from the window hit it just right — enough for the photo to glow between them. Isla blinked once, twice, as her mind caught up with what she was seeing.
Her and Tyler. The ballroom floor. The kiss.
The image was too perfect, too polished to feel real — like it had been staged for a magazine spread rather than captured in the middle of something raw and unplanned. The flash had caught everything: the soft spill of her ivory gown, the way Tyler's hand cupped her jaw, the faint, stunned parting of her lips. Behind them, faces blurred into nothing but color and light — a thousand silent witnesses rendered irrelevant by the intimacy of that single frame.
Isla's stomach dropped.
It wasn't scandalous, exactly — if anything, the photo had an almost cinematic stillness to it. But the caption scrolling beneath it stripped that calm away:
Mystery baker steals a kiss after royal waltz — torn between crown and commoner?
A laugh escaped her — startled, hollow around the edges. "They make it sound like I choreographed that."
Callie arched a brow, unbothered. "Well," she said dryly, "you did steal the scene. Again."
Isla pressed a hand to her forehead, the words on the screen blurring slightly as she let out another incredulous sound — somewhere between a sigh and a laugh. The kind you make when you're too tired to be properly outraged.
"I can't even have one normal photograph," she muttered.
Callie smirked. "You? Normal? Please. You're trending in high definition."
Isla didn't answer right away. Her hand went to rest on the counter, fingers brushing the cool edge of the marble as if grounding herself there. The photo glowed faintly on Callie's screen, that single moment frozen in impossible clarity.
She should've looked away by now. Should've laughed it off, rolled her eyes, said something easy and dismissive. But instead she just stared — at her own face tilted up toward Tyler's, at the unguarded way he looked at her, as if there had been nothing else in that room.
It wasn't just embarrassment tightening in her chest. There was something else beneath it — something smaller and sharper.
The memory unfolded behind her eyes whether she wanted it to or not. The music, the hush before the kiss. The press of his hand against her jaw, the faint tremor in his breath right before everything stopped making sense. And under all of it, that impossible knot of warmth and ache that still hadn't fully untangled.
"It wasn't like that," she said softly, more to herself than to Callie.
"Doesn't matter," Callie replied, scrolling lazily. "People will decide what it was." She scrolled further — the quick blur of fingers over glass. Hashtags flashed past.
#RoyalAffair
#BallroomBetrayal
#BakerBetweenPrinces
Callie tilted her head, scrolling. "You've made it, Reed. You're a certified national distraction."
"Perfect," she muttered. "Just what every baker dreams of — becoming public property."
"Hey," Callie said, softer this time. "At least you photograph well."
That earned a real laugh, low and brief — a crack in the tension before it folded back into quiet.
"Oh—" a small laugh escaped with the word, soft and incredulous. "They're loving this. Half the comments think you planned the whole thing."
Isla leaned back against the counter, arms folded tightly across her chest. A short, humorless laugh slipped out before she could stop it.
"Of course," she said. "Why not turn it into a love triangle?"
Callie didn't look up right away, still absently scrolling, her thumb moving in slow, measured strokes. "They saw you dance with three men," she said matter-of-factly. "Then one kissed you. The internet's already declared it a saga."
"A saga," Isla repeated, rubbing a hand over her forehead. "That's not comforting."
"I didn't say it was."
The sunlight had shifted again, stretching longer across the floorboards but still bright — the kind of lazy afternoon glow that made everything feel softer, slower.
For a while, neither of them said anything. Callie kept scrolling, half-curious, half-exasperated, until she let out a small noise that could have been a laugh.
"Here," she said, handing Isla the phone. "Brace yourself."
Isla hesitated, then took it. Posts had already started multiplying — blurry screenshots, exaggerated captions, and wild theories. One account had even mapped out her so-called "love triangle," complete with stills of Dorian, Cael, and Tyler lined up like pieces in a royal scandal.
Another had posted a "who will she choose?" meme, complete with numbered slides like it was a televised competition.
She groaned, thumb dragging across the screen before pushing it back toward Callie. "They make it look like I'm collecting royals like limited editions."
Callie grinned. "At least they think you have good taste."
"That's your takeaway?"
"I'm trying to find the silver lining."
Isla snorted, half-laughing despite herself. "You're impossible."
"And you're trending," Callie replied, tilting the phone like proof.
Isla crossed her arms again, shaking her head. "I don't even know what that means anymore."
"It means," Callie said, leaning back into the couch cushions with a smug little smile, "you're living in a saga, sweetheart."
That earned a quiet groan — followed by another faint laugh. The kind that didn't fix anything but made the air feel lighter for a moment.