Her phone is dark. Mine sits face down on the nightstand, the world held at bay by an inch of wood and the decision to not look. I try to keep it there. I succeed until the vibration starts, steady and insistent, a quiet summons that does not care about cocoa or fairy lights or the way a woman’s hand curls in sleep when she has nothing left to hold.
I slip my arm from beneath her carefully, trade my chest for the edge of a pillow, tuck the sheet back around her shoulders because she makes a small sound when air cools the skin she has just warmed. She does not wake. I reach for the phone, shield the screen with my palm so the light does not find her face, and read.
Problem at The Copper Clover. Owner’s been moving money for the Italians. You want it cleaned up?
The room stays as it was, warm and quiet, but the temperature inside my chest changes. The words are simple, nothing I have not seen a hundred times with different names attached, yet the shape of them fits too neatly beside the shape of her sleeping mouth and the mugs on the dresser and the scent of orange resting in the air.
6
AOIFE
Over the next month
The first week of December always smells like orange peel and heat, like sugar melting in a pot that knows better than to scorch and cloves crushed under my thumb until they give up their perfume, and this morning the kitchen at The Copper Clover is loud with all of it. It's warm enough to coax me out of my coat and into the rhythm that makes sense when the rest of the city is a tangled string of lights and obligations. I zest six blood oranges in a row, the ruby spray misting my knuckles, then fold the curls of peel into a pot where honey loosens with a sigh and a shot of whiskey wakes the air. I tell Oscar to keep his fingers out of the pot if he values a future with fingerprints.
“On a scale of one to lawsuit,” he says, hovering with a spoon anyway, “how mad would you be if I licked the spoon that is not technically designated for licking.”
“I would salt it when you’re not looking,” I say, without looking. “And then write a sonnet about your tears.”
He laughs and drifts toward pastry, because the cinnamon-sugar smell is strong there and the ovens are doing their softmetal breathing. Siobhan, friend and colleague, slides me a tray of gingerbread to taste while she hides her grin in her shoulder. The cookies are dark and slightly sticky, the spice ratio aggressive in all the right ways, and I break one open to check for the line of gleam in the center that says the molasses and heat made friends. I nod and she exhales like she was holding her breath for the grade.
The list on the prep board is a minor epic—duck legs for confit in the back pan with thyme and garlic, a duck-fat rosti I’ve been testing that would make a potato weep with pride, brussels sprouts shaved fine, tossed with cider reduction and a handful of toasted hazelnuts. Guinness gingerbread with a lemon hard sauce that refuses to be polite. A bright, sharp salad of fennel, pear, and watercress that will keep the rich things honest. I run the knife through the fennel in clean ribbons, listening to the click of steel on board. I breathe through the part where the morning gets busy and everyone gets noisy and it sounds like a train station if a train station cared about micro-plane graters and the precise temperature butter reaches when it remembers it used to be cream.
It would be easy, in this din and softness, to forget that the man whose coat has migrated to the back of my chair somehow, and whose book—Seamus Heaney, dog-eared at the poem where earth is a mouth—has been pretending to belong on my shelf for a month, carries a life in his pocket that never uses its inside voice. I do not forget. I refuse also to ruin a morning with what I cannot fix. The coat stays where it is, the book makes the shelf look like it has better taste, and the smell of orange on my skin will outlast whatever worry tries to stick.
Chef Wallace arrives late, his hair damp and combed too flat, eyes shiny with the kind of optimism that turns to temper when a ticket gets lost on the rail. He walks into my station with his hands already raised in the posture of a sermon, surveys themise like he is appraising jewels, and says, “We’re going to run the duck with a cranberry gastrique instead of the orange, Aoife, it’ll read more festive.”
“It will read like a sugar bomb,” I say, polite enough to pass the health inspection of manners, and tilt the pot so he can smell the balance I’ve built. “Pair it with the fennel, let the fat sing. You hired me because I know how to make the old things interesting.”
He holds my gaze for a beat. The lines around his eyes cut deeper. Then he nods and wipes his palms on his apron as if the argument left residue. “Fine. But make me one plate with the cran, I want to see it.”
“Copy,” I say.
By lunch, the dining room is a low roar of knit hats and scarves draped on chairs, fake fir in the windows, steam ghosting off plates. The open kitchen makes me visible on purpose, and today I feel it the way I do when a storm is two blocks away but the air has already decided, a prickle at the base of my skull and a sense of being watched that isn’t entirely untrue. There’s a beat-up sedan across the street that has been there three mornings in a row, wipers ticking even when the rain has stopped, and a guy with a newspaper who never turns a page. I make a mental note to tell the manager about creeps, and then I laugh at myself because if those men were creeps, they would not be so tidy about it. Declan’s world has edges that cut clean, and while he never says so, some of those edges have taken up residence at the corner of my block.
I don’t push. I could. I could ask about the quiet calls he takes in my bathroom at two in the morning when my window is open to catch the moth noise of the street and his voice is low enough to peel paint. I could ask about the nights he comes over and smells like ocean and metal and something that isn’t fear but knows its neighbor. I do not, because whatever this is livesonly as long as I let it be itself, and because I have learned that questions can sink boats as well as steady them.
“Your boyfriend reads like a priest,” Oscar says under his breath, arranging carrot coins with exaggerated precision. “He showed me how to fold my napkin at the staff meal like it was a sacrament.”
“He is not my boyfriend,” I say, because categories are trick doors I am not in the mood to fall through.
“Your… coat donor,” he amends, pleased with himself, and I flick a caper at his forehead.
The week stretches into the kind of crowded that makes time bend, afternoons sucked into early darkness and peppermint outnumbering common sense. Declan appears in the margins and somehow also in the center—a second toothbrush in my cup. A bottle of wine on my counter with a cork that has given up without a fight because his hands know the way out of things. A stack of newspapers on my chair because he has already read three versions of the city and wants me to read one. He reads me recipes as if they are love letters and calls me spitfire when I make him tea and manage to do it in a way that looks like strength and not service. He sleeps like a man who does not trust sleep and eats like he is listening to a story I do not hear.
I wish I could draw a little map of the part of my life that belongs to him and the part that belongs to me, but maps lie, they suggest borders where there are only paths. What I have instead is a kitchen, a boyish staff that treats me like a benevolent dictator, a city that speaks in salt and old brick, and a man who is trying to learn how to come home without shaking the whole doorframe.
Then, in the second week of December, the door does not open at all.
The notice is taped crooked across the glass when I arrive at seven, white paper with a municipal stamp and the wordsTemporarily Closed by Order of the Citythat look like a joke until I see the city seal and the too-official signature of a man who has never eaten a duck rosti in his life. The padlock is new, fat and shiny, the kind of lock that makes you feel like the lock itself thinks you did something wrong. My stomach falls with the same suddenness it does when a bus hits a pothole at speed.
“What the hell,” Oscar says at my shoulder, breath clouding. Siobhan arrives wearing a hat that makes her look like a cheerful mushroom and stops dead, coffee halfway to her mouth.
“Did we fail an inspection?” she asks, voice small, then large. “We did not fail an inspection. I swept behind the refrigerator myself. I found a coin from 1998 and two mystery raisins. I organized them by year.”
We do the dance everyone does when confronted with a closed door they counted on. The group chat lights up with blue pings—servers with rent due, a dishwasher who just bought Christmas pajamas for his twins, Wallace’s name without a reply dot in sight. A stranger with a clipboard from the city walks by and fails to look at us, which is how I know we are officially invisible.
“Back door,” I say, and we all look at each other like children who have just remembered the hole in the fence.
