Cheryl was a waitress that Greyson had recommended to Ashley. She was a pretty young girl who worked hard. Ashley thought highly of her.
"Ashley, you're finally here," Cheryl said in a shaky voice. The young girl had never been in such a situation before and was visually shaken by it. Her eyes were wide with fear and red from crying. Ashley approached her, patted the girl reassuringly on the back and asked, "What happened?"
"I am not sure. When I came here, I saw a girl lying in front of our shop and her parents said that their daughter had blacked out after she ate one of our cakes,"
Cheryl said with a worried tone in her voice.
When the father of the girl saw Ashley, he stopped crying and stood up immediately. He pointed at Ashley and shouted angrily, "You're the boss here, right?
I heard that the cakes in your shop were delicious, so I bought some vanilla cream puffs. My wife and I didn't have a chance to try them because we had something to do.
But when our daughter Jenny came home from school, she saw the cream puffs and had some and now she has passed out."
The man then turned around and looked at the crowd as he squeezed out a few tears. "I didn't expect that my daughter would get sick after eating a cake from this shop.
You'd better not buy anything from this bakery. The food here isn't safe to eat," he said indignantly.
He then turned to his daughter and bent down stroking her hair. "Oh, my poor girl. She is so young and now she is lying unconscious because she ate a cream puff from this bakery."
The girl's mother who was squatting down beside the unconscious girl shook her body and cried, "Wake up, Jenny. Please open your eyes. I can't lose you, sweetie."
The onlookers started whispering to one another.
"I ate food from that shop, it was really good and I didn't get sick from it. Perhaps something else has made his daughter sick," a man said.
"Oh that poor little girl. It doesn't look like her parents are acting. Who would use their own daughter to pretend something as terrible as this?" said a woman.
Upon hearing this, the man let out a deep sigh and shut up.
"Is that man telling the truth? The food in that shop isn't safe to eat?"
"Oh, isn't that man the owner of Teddy Bear Bakery? Why would he come here to buy a cake, when he has his own cakes?" a man asked curiously when he recognized the sulking father to be the owner of the Teddy Bear Bakery.
The expression on the father's face froze and he looked rattled for a moment. However, he quickly composed himself and said, "Yes, I am the owner of that bakery. But I noticed that this shop was very popular so I came here to try some of the cakes. I never expected something like this to happen..."
The father's words had made sense and his daughter was still lying on the ground in a coma. The bystanders took pity on him and began to believe his story. They started to side with the weeping parents.
...
Ashley looked at the forming crowd in front of her shop. She wasn't fazed by their remarks and skeptical glances.
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