For a long moment we say nothing. The clock over the bar ticks with that theatrical hush old rooms have, as if the walls themselves are listening. Outside, a truck rumbles by, a dog barks, a child yelps and laughs, and the world keeps going. I pick up my tea again, feel the heat through the porcelain.
“I have run this family’s face for thirty years,” she says finally, setting her cup just off center on the saucer and leaving it there because the imperfection will irritate any woman who comes after and tries to place herself in the room. “I have buried a husband. I have held a son while he bled. I have watched the city eat people who wanted only to be left alone. It is not a judgment to tell you this, Aoife, it is a map.” She leans in, just a fraction. “You do not survive by pretending the water is shallow.”
“I am a swimmer,” I say, almost smiling. “I have been in kitchens since I could see over a counter. A line cook would laugh at the idea of shallow.”
She nods once, a concession to my backbone. “You will need friends,” she says. “Not his. Not mine. Yours. Women who will lie to the press with a straight face and tell the school your sonis with his grandmother when he is three doors down in a safe room. Men who will keep their mouths shut when your bread tastes better than their pride. The rest I cannot teach you.”
“I am not asking you to,” I say.
“No,” she says, standing with that terrible grace of hers. “You are asking me to bless you. I can only warn you.”
She lifts her coat and slides into it without a wrinkle, smooth as a card trick. The glove buttons glint as her cuff catches the light. The silver is old, softened by hands. Harps, yes, and a thin braid around each rim. Details, always details. She fastens the top three and leaves the last two undone, a calculated ease.
At the door she turns. “Do not confuse the boy’s presence for immunity. It is leverage for you and a target for everyone else.”
I feel the spike of fear, acknowledge it, and put it down. “Thank you for your concern,” I say. “We will be fine.”
Her smile is not unkind. It is simply a closing of the ledger. “Then cook well,” she says. “If you are to stay, you must be indispensable.”
When she is gone the room feels larger, colder, as if she took some of the oxygen with her. I collect the cups, stack the saucers, wipe the ring her tea left on the table with a clean cloth because the gesture calms me. The kettle hisses again, a small complaint in an empty morning.
The staff trickles in, a clatter of boots and jokes and the shriek of the ancient espresso machine pulling its first shot. I tie on my apron and step into the warm territory where flour covers sins and risk tastes like sugar. Orders are taped to the pass for a tasting with a vendor at noon. I line up ingredients like soldiers and then let them behave like friends. Brown butter for the soda bread scones, raisins plumped in whiskey, orange zest rubbed into sugar until the whole bowl smells like a holiday that does not ask permission to be joyful. I shape the dough, stamp circles,paint them with cream, and slide the tray into the oven. The heat slaps my face, the kind of slap that means I am home.
Siobhan is already in the prep kitchen when I go back for herbs, chopping carrots with such precise fury the knife whispers like a metronome. She stands square to the board, shoulders tight, platinum hair caught in a clip that looks dangerous, eyes bright in a way that reads as too awake for morning. The pile of coins beside her is uniform and perfect, a bright orange mountain of obedience.
“You’ll take a finger if you keep courting the blade like that,” I say, because humor is how you enter a room that has forgotten how to breathe.
She laughs, quick and high. “It should be grateful,” she says. “We have such short lives, may as well be interesting.”
“Carrots live longer than some people I know,” I say. “Morning.”
“Morning,” she answers, and there is that famous smile, the one that got us out of so many tickets when we were seventeen, the one that used to mean mischief and now means something I cannot name. “How was your guest?”
“Which one,” I ask, rinsing parsley, letting the cold water bite my wrists.
She grins. “The queen mother.”
“Correct,” I say, then add, “She prefers outcomes to parades,” because I know Siobhan collects the lines I drop and keeps them like charms.
Siobhan rolls a carrot under her palm and sets the knife down long enough to look at me fully. “Outcome of her visit,” she says, voice light, “or do I need to sharpen another knife.”
“We traded pleasantries,” I say. “She warned me about sharks. I told her I have a pot and a stove.”
“She would be delicious braised,” Siobhan says, almost sweetly, and the joke lands in that strange space where laughterfeels like the wrong temperature. She picks up the knife again and resumes the rhythm, chop, chop, chop, relentless, clean.
“Late nights for a while,” I say, pivoting. “We increase the buddy system on close. No one to cars alone, we walk each other, we share rides or we sleep in the office. There are too many stories in the papers.”
She snorts softly. “Stories keep papers alive. Bodies keep police busy. We, on the other hand, have a menu.”
I dry my hands and lean my hip against the prep table. “I am serious. You do not brush off rumors because they do not smell like your grandmother’s kitchen. There are patterns, and I do not intend to be one.”
She tips her chin, a half salute. “Yes, Chef.”
“Pepper spray stays in your pocket, not your tote. The back alley gets the new bulb today, and the night watch logs arrivals and departures.” I look at her. “You do not argue with me on this.”
She draws the blade through a carrot and smiles, all teeth. “Some men hate it when women have kitchens of their own,” she says, like a proverb, like a dare. “They make a mess they expect us to clean.”
“Some men can choke,” I answer, too fast, and she laughs again, a sound that sits bright on the surface and does not travel down.
