And I stare at my reflection, trembling, undone, knowing he is right.
After we come down from the high of it, he holds me close in his arms and I let myself uncoil. “No more running,” I say, both to himself and me. I can feel him nodding. He speaks a moment later. “Then we fix this, once and for all.”
27
AOIFE
Aweek later
The stage smells like steel and citrus and the soft, stubborn sweetness of warm honey, the kind that clings to your wrists if you aren’t careful. It is two days before Christmas and the Irish Culinary Advancement Finals have turned a grand hotel ballroom into a cathedral for knives and nerves. Banners hang from the balcony, green on cream, the judges’ table set like an altar under white light, the audience a dark sea pricked with camera phones and winter scarves.
I stand behind my station and roll my shoulders back until my spine clicks into place. My hands won’t stop humming, not shaking exactly, more like a low voltage that makes every small movement sharp. Beside me, a tray of soda bread tuile has cooled into fragile curls. The seaweed butter is the color of young moss. A copper pot holds salted honey custard that trembles if you breathe wrong. My whisk sits in a bowl of hot water like a tool laid down between hymns.
The dish is a memory made in parts. Soda bread curls for the bakery I lost. Seaweed butter for the coast that raised my boy. Honey custard for every woman in my family who stood by astove and made sweetness out of scarcity. Whiskey foam because I am done pretending that fire belongs only to men.
“Five minutes,” the floor manager says, voice smooth, smile rigid. I nod and stop hearing anything that isn’t the sound of my own breath.
Declan stands at the back in a dark suit that makes the room look brighter. He never pushes into the front row. He always watches from the angle you forget until you feel it. Liam sits on his hip with red ear protectors and a fox pin on his sweater, kicking his small shoe against his father’s thigh. When Liam spots me, he waves the way a lighthouse would if it had hands. I lift my whisk in salute and pretend the motion doesn’t steady me.
I begin.
Soda bread curls onto the plate first, lacy and warm where the butter has kissed it thin. A dot of seaweed butter goes under each curl so they hold. I drag a spoon through the custard and it lands with that soft belly-sigh that tells you the set is right. I load the syphon with the whiskey foam and shake gently, the way you’d wake someone you loved. One press. The foam settles like a pale, tipsy cloud. A few crystals of smoked salt between finger and thumb. A line of candied peel as slim as a ribbon. I breathe out and the world returns.
“Chef Kelly,” the head judge says, voice amplified, eyebrows raised in a way that makes most mortals confess. “Tell us what we’re tasting.”
“Bread and sea,” I say. “And what happens to both when you remember not to be afraid.”
He smiles at the brevity and picks up his spoon.
The first judge closes his eyes the way people do when they stop pretending they aren’t hungry. The woman in the middle tilts her head left—her tell for salt—and then right—her tell for texture—and nods. The third, a pastry tyrant who once madea contestant cry with a look, clears his throat and makes a sound I have not heard from him on television. It is small and involuntary and could buy me a bakery in any city.
I do not look at Declan while they eat. I watch their hands. I watch for the second bite. I count their breaths. In my peripheral vision, Liam claps at a bird only he can see.
The last spoon lands. The head judge leans toward his microphone. “Thank you,” he says, and it sounds less like a formality and more like an apology for every time food was not treated like a thing with a soul.
We wait in the kind of silence that tightens the air. The lights heat the back of my neck. Somewhere in the balcony a person coughs and then regrets existing. The emcee says something about sponsors and tradition and excellence and my hands finally stop humming because there is nothing left to do.
“And the winner,” he announces, “of the Irish Culinary Advancement Finals—this year’s rising fire—Aoife Kelly, of The Green Hearth.”
The sound hits me before the meaning does. The room blows open with applause, a warm human weather. Someone whistles. Someone cries my name like it has more syllables than usual. I feel myself move without moving, walking into the white light, accepting a plaque that weighs more than pride should, and there is a flash of cameras and a rustle of papers and then there are arms around my waist that belong to a small, determined person, and I bend and Liam is there, hot-cheeked and grinning.
“You did it,” he says into my neck, voice like a secret. “You won the boat race.”
“It was a dessert,” I whisper back. “But yes. The boat won.”
Declan stays back, as always. He does not make himself part of my victory. He keeps his hands in his pockets and the line of his mouth carved in something that might be joy if joy remembered how to stand straight.
They press a microphone into my hand and the crowd hushes and I try to locate my tongue.
“I made food because I was hungry,” I say, and a laugh runs through the seats, quick and kind. “I kept making it because other people were hungry too. My team” —I pause for a bit because my throat is scratchy— “they stood in the heat with me. They are my spine. My son is my heart.” I find Liam in the front now, perched on a chair beside a handler who looks terrified of him and everything he might do with a paper cup. “And to the one who made me brave again—” I look at Declan then, straight on, and let the words go to him like a plate I know he won’t drop— “thank you.”
After, the hotel funnels us into a rooftop celebration under glass. Heaters glow like small suns. A live trio plays in the corner, violin spilling a tune that sounds Irish if you squint. Snow flirts with the skylight. My team crowds me with happy chaos—wet eyes, a thousand photos, the inside jokes that kept us upright during prep week. Someone puts a flute of something sparkling in my hand. Someone else puts a second.
The first drink tastes like apple and altitude. The second tastes like something I can finish. I take a sip and feel the alcohol spread through my chest like a warm hand. I set the glass down because I want to remember this night for what it is, not for what it blurs, and I take Liam’s paper crown and place it on my own head and he howls with delight at the injustice.
“Stay still,” Declan says quietly, tugging the crown straight, and I catch his mouth when he thinks I won’t. Quick, clean, a kiss like a signature. He brushes his thumb across my cheek, smiling without showing teeth, the smile he keeps for rooms that don’t deserve the real thing.
People talk. Congratulations fall like confetti. I drink half of the second cocktail because a well-meaning sponsor with ahaircut like a hedge won’t stop hovering until I do. The room tilts, only a little. I tell myself it’s relief.
