Total pages in book: 92
Estimated words: 89238 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 446(@200wpm)___ 357(@250wpm)___ 297(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 89238 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 446(@200wpm)___ 357(@250wpm)___ 297(@300wpm)
Hopes dashed, I leave, trudging to Elodie’s. I’ll just have to deal with Sebastian.
I make better chocolate.
I have a classier shop.
I’m nicer.
If he drives me out of this neighborhood, I’ll start over again with a new location. That man won’t put me out of business. I won’t give him the power.
When I pull on the door to Elodie’s, the comforting scent of chocolate greets me.
But so do Amanda, Eliza, Ally, Kenji, Margo, and Gage. They’re all bursting with smiles.
“We have some good news,” Kenji chirps.
Amanda grabs my wrist and tugs me to the café section.
“What’s going on?” I ask, every single molecule confused.
Once I’m sitting, Amanda clears her throat. “Confession: Eliza, Ally, and I haven’t been going to get boba after school.”
Worry prickles along my spine. “What have you been up to?” I ask carefully.
“It seems…they’re detectives,” Gage puts in, clearly amused.
Okay, not drugs.
“And so am I,” Margo says, then shifts her head back and forth, hedging. “Okay, more like the getaway driver.”
“Ooh, can I be the hacker then in our heist crew?” Kenji asks, enthused.
“You didn’t really hack,” Ally points out.
My head spins. “Can someone please tell me what’s going on?”
Amanda picks up her phone to check the screen, and I’m about to lose my mind. I’m not typically an impatient person, but right now that’s all I am.
“It’s Silver. She’ll be here in a few minutes,” Amanda explains.
“That’s me,” Kenji says, tapping his chest. “I’m the Silver connection.”
“Exactly, not the hacker,” Ally adds emphatically.
“Guys!” I shout.
“Tell her,” Gage instructs.
Amanda meets my gaze with some nerves, but mostly…glee. “Okay, you know how we kept saying The Chocolate Connoisseur’s chocolate sucks?”
“I remember that fondly,” I say.
“We decided to have a taste test to see if we could figure out why,” Eliza jumps in, clearly eager to take a turn in the tale. “Because my dad brought some of it home that day.”
Amanda grins. “And the funny thing is it tasted really, really familiar.”
“Like a certain store-bought chocolate,” Ally adds, then names a very popular brand.
Like household-name levels.
I sit up straighter. “It does?”
Eliza nods, big and long. “Yes. So much.”
Amanda sets a hand on my arm, a subtle sign I might not like what she’s about to say. “And we really wanted to find out if it was this store-bought brand he was using, so we went to his little factory. It’s in a warehouse over in the Mission District. So we were going there instead of going to boba,” Amanda says, adding a please forgive me grin.
“How did you get to the Mission District?” My voice is on helium.
“We took a bus,” Amanda says.
A bus? Alone? Oh god. I’m freaking out and I don’t even know why. Except, she’s mine and have we gone over the rules for buses? I hope so. I really hope so. The Mission District isn’t too far away. But it’s not their stomping grounds.
“My sister takes them a lot,” Ally explains. “She helped us figure out the routes.”
It’s fine. A bus is fine. I’m fine. “Okaaaay.”
“And we really wanted to go because when I was looking up salad recipes last month I read an article about a restaurant in Los Angeles that claimed to be vegan,” Amanda says, sounding just like a detective indeed. “But it turned out they were lying and using real butter and a food writer busted them by looking through their garbage.”
“You looked through his garbage?” Helium times ten.
“We used gloves,” Eliza explains matter-of-factly. “It was just like the beach cleanup.”
I blow out a breath. She has a point. “So, you took it upon yourselves to be investigative chocolate reporters,” I say, making sure I’ve got ahold of the facts.
A warm, reassuring hand slides up my back. “Just let them tell the story.”
Amanda bounces. “Anyway, so when we were there, we found out that…”
In unison, all three girls say, “We were right.”
That’s the real too-good-to-be-true. “You were right?” I repeat slowly because I can’t quite believe it. Except I want to believe it so badly.
Kenji hoots. “He doesn’t make his own chocolate like he claims. He’s not only not bean to bar, he’s not even chocolate to confection.”
The day I met him at the chocolate show, he went on and on about his bean-to-bar creations, with his subtle implication that his small-batch style made him better than my approach as a chocolatier, who sources chocolate to use for her confections.
When he’s neither.
He’s not a chocolate-maker, nor a chocolatier. He’s simply a copycat.
Margo grins sagely. “Apparently, he’s the grocery-store-to-Chocolate Connoisseur.”
“For real?” I whisper, tingles spreading across my skin. This is too delicious. Too wonderful. I’m holding my breath.
Amanda swipes her thumb across the screen, showing me damning photo after damning photo. Wrappers from bulk-size store-bought brands fill the dumpsters at the factory where The Chocolate Connoisseur produces its cheap chocolate knockoffs that it claims it makes from Ecuadorian cocoa.