With Ambrose guaranteed to stay out of her way, Laura had spent a quiet evening and an even quieter morning trying out recipes.

She tried making the liquor chocolates again—without the potion, of course—but they looked too plain to have even half a chance at the grand prize. Her sugar sculptures were always eye-catching, but they didn’t have a complex enough taste. And everything else she tried lacked in both looks and flavor.

Even with her unwelcome suitor gone, she wasn’t making any progress. And the worst part was that, in his absence, she still managed to see traces of him all around. Whenever she tested one of her works in progress, it was his voice commenting on ways to improve the taste or the texture, and when she did manage to get something right, it was him again, complimenting her in her mind.

It felt like an invisible version of him was still following her around, and when she tried to look for the flesh and blood Ambrose, it only reminded her of what she had done to him.

She managed to catch a glimpse of him early in the day, when he had first reached the bakery. When he turned and saw her, he clutched at his chest as before, then fumbled desperately with his keys to unlock the door and escape inside. Then he was out of sight for the better part of the morning. When their eyes met again hours later, as they were both serving behind the counters of their respective businesses, it happened again. His casual smile dropped from his face, and he looked close to fainting.

When Laura next checked, there was someone else serving at the till. She didn’t see him again for the rest of the day, no matter how many times she checked through the windows, and judging by the bakery’s markedly diminished number of female customers, he had probably retreated to the back. He had always enjoyed baking more than dealing with people, even if his easy charm made it look otherwise.

Not seeing him at all left her with an empty space in her chest, as if the hunger in her stomach had crawled up into her heart and settled in there. She knew it was only the power of habit, having had him right there in front of her eyes for the two years she had kept shop by herself, but telling herself that did nothing to fill that emptiness.

It was still there after closing hours, dulling her senses and hindering her progress. She couldn’t come up with a proper recipe when everything she sampled tasted like ash, so she had to give up early and leave for home. But the uneasy feeling followed her there, too. It kept her awake until the small hours, and the little sleep she did get was weighed down with nightmares.

In the morning, her eyes were swollen, and her head was swimming with contradicting thoughts. She couldn’t tell whether it was guilt or something else making her hurt so much for Ambrose, and she truly didn’t want to think about it. There were more urgent things she needed to take care of. Only, her mind refused to concentrate on anything but him and the trouble she’d put him through.

“I think we need to talk,” her uncle said in place of a greeting when she finally dragged herself to the breakfast table.

He wasn’t wearing his glasses, and the squinting made his eyes look even more intense than usual. There were very few reasons for him to ever forgo his spectacles, and the likeliest was that whatever he wanted to talk about was serious. He was too good at telling when Laura was lying, and he knew she was likely to do it this time.

And she did consider it, but only for the briefest of moments. Hiding things had only managed to get her into even deeper trouble.

“I think we do, too,” she said on a sigh. “I cursed Ambrose Waycaster.”

Her uncle sputtered. Lucky thing, he wasn’t drinking his tea just then. “Well,” he said after composing himself, “I was going to give you a talk about fixing your sleeping habits, but I think that can wait. How exactly did you curse the boy?”

“With a potion.”

A small hum. “That explains why you took my mandrake root. Where did you even find the recipe? Please don’t tell me it was in that horrid book your mother inherited from our aunt.”

Laura gave a hesitant nod. “What’s wrong with it? All the recipes in the grimoire work fine.”

“That’s just the problem, they all do exactly what they claim. It’s dangerous magic, and you’re not trained to use it. I knew I should have insisted on sending you to the Academy; you would have made a brilliant mage.” He stopped for a moment and massaged the bridge of his nose. “Right. What spell did you use?”

“A Draught for Hate,” she said in a small voice, before starting her excuses. “But only because none of the antidotes seemed to work!”

“Antidotes for what?”

“The love potion he had on accident.”

The words were coming easier now, and if she was going to ask for help, she had to tell the whole truth. So she did, starting from the moment she had decided to use a spell in her contest chocolates until the present.

Her uncle drank his tea and nodded along, keeping quiet until the story was over.

“That is quite a situation you have on your hands. What are you planning to do?” There was no blame or judgment in his tone, only the mild curiosity of a magic scholar.

Laura looked down at her hands, anxiously crumpling the napkin in her lap. “I don’t know, but I need to do something quickly. There are only two days left until the contest. I can’t work properly, and I’m reasonably sure he can’t, either. Great-aunt doesn’t have an antidote listed for this spell in particular, but I could try one of the three I've already used. I even have the ingredients on hand.”

“A general repellent like that won’t work for a spell with a mandrake base. Sometimes the spell fizzles out in time, but I doubt that would happen with one of Auntie’s. Our best bet is to make a reversal draught based on the original recipe, but that is going to take a few weeks of research at the very least.”

“Weeks? I can barely spare a day. Isn’t there a faster option?”

“No,” he said, punctuating his response with a shake of his head. “There are no instant cure-alls for curses, as far as I know. None that are documented in the journals, in any case. You do hear about the miraculous effects of a true love’s kiss every now and then, but such cases are rare and impossible to study.”

He kept talking in the fashion of every magic enthusiast, but Laura’s ears failed to intercept any of his words.

“So what do I do, then?” she managed to ask, cutting through his lecture.

He shrugged. “Bring me the recipe, and we’ll get to work. With a little luck, he’ll be back to normal in a month or so. In the meantime, try not to cross paths with him. His heart must be in agony, torn between his real fondness for you and the hatred forced upon it by the draught’s effects. The less he sees of you, the better.”

That turned out to be easier than expected. Ambrose himself stayed out of sight for the whole morning, and no matter how much Laura peered over from her spot at the till, she couldn’t catch even a trace of him on the other side of the street. By noon, she had a crick in her neck to accompany the dull pain that resided in her chest.

She missed him. As much as she had complained, she’d grown used to seeing him whenever she looked up from her work, and although his perpetual smile often grated on her nerves, it was, in truth, quite endearing.

Finally admitting these things to herself made that churning emptiness in her chest diminish a little, and her stomach, no longer pressed by the weight of her conflicting feelings, gave a loud protest. She was late for her lunch break.

Then, just as she was turning toward her workshop, she caught a glimpse of bright blond hair and a slim smile that could only belong to one person. Ambrose saw her then, too, and the moment their eyes met, the same pained expression took over his face, and his hands went to his chest.

Laura’s heart echoed his pain, bile rising to the back of her throat. This was her doing. She’d inflicted this much pain upon a man solely because of her ambition to win a stupid contest. And she couldn’t even fix things!

As her uncle had said, the only thing she could do was stay out of sight so that she wouldn’t cause any more harm. So she ran to hide in her workshop.

That was supposed to be her safe space, where she could let her problems go and think of solutions in peace, but that day, the fates had decided to go against her. From a shelf in the corner of the room, six perfect jars of wildflower jelly were staring at her accusatorily. She had been so caught up in trying to cure Ambrose of his feelings that she had forgotten why he had come to her in the first place. He never got his jar of jelly, and seeing how things were going, there was no way she could give it to him before her uncle found a cure.

A burn in her eyes announced that tears were imminent, and she let them fall, allowing her mind to finally unpack all the thoughts she had kept at bay so far.

It was stupid of her to play with magic she couldn’t control and couldn’t turn back. What a conceited person she was, too, assuming she knew a man’s feelings better than he did himself. And what a shame that she didn’t love him back; at least then, she could break the curse with just one kiss.

That last thought took her by surprise. It said a lot about her state of mind that she didn’t find the idea of kissing Ambrose unpleasant. Far from it, in fact.

Something stirred in her stomach, and it felt like butterflies.