“You have a food processor right?”
He pointed to the cupboard in the corner. “It's not great but it does the trick.”
Penny assembled the rest of the ingredients and gave Brett the job of draining the beans he was such a fan of into the bowl with the blades. “Make sure you rinse them first,” she instructed.
“Aye aye, Captain.”
Penny rolled her eyes. Brett, it turned out, was an excellent sous chef. They worked in tandem until she had the sauce made and the falafel paste ready to go. She drizzled oil in the pan and twisted the knob on the stove to start heating it.
Brett rinsed his hands and dried them with the towel on the counter. “Want me to make the salad? That's definitely in my wheelhouse.”
Penny nodded and tossed him the bag of salad mix. “I'm glad you're not one of those guys that just eats mac and cheese and cereal for dinner.”
“Oh, I could definitely be one of those guys if I wanted to. You should’ve seen me in college.”
“Where did you go for your MBA?”
“U of C. Stayed close to home. I was still working, so it made the most sense. You?”
Penny rolled the oil in the pan. “I went to UBC.” She didn't elaborate since the reasons she'd stayed home were extremely different from his. Lucas had started to spiral the year she graduated high school.
At first, their whole family was convinced it was just a phase, a rebellious streak, after leaving the house and finding people who liked to party on campus. But when Penny hung out with his friends and said something about their wild weekends, Lucas's friend Sam had looked at her like she'd grown a second head.
Over the course of the night, she realized that Lucas seemed to be the only one getting smashed on the weekend. Alone. In his apartment. That was the first moment of many when she'd been scared for him.
She tried to talk to him about it, but he was convinced he didn't have a problem. He said it was normal to feel stressed and normal to try to take care of it himself.I won’t do it forever.Those words echoed in her head like the peals of a gong.
At the time, he was maintaining good grades in school and nothing else seemed amiss, so she had no rebuttal as all the research she did defined addiction as behavior that negatively impacted everyday life. Lucas had seemed fine, even though the voice in her head was screaming that he was anything but.
“Penny?”
She looked up and saw Brett was watching her.
“Mm-hmm?”
“I think I lost you there for a second.”
“Yeah, sorry, just thinking.”
“About that email?” Brett’s voice was low and gentle. Penny blinked.Had she mentioned that to him?
“Right, yeah.” She paused, not sure what to say next, but grateful for anything that would steer her thoughts away from that night four years ago. “It was an email from my ex.”
“The guy your parents hated but you liked and followed out to Calgary?”
Penny’s eyes flicked to his. He’d been listening. She pulled a ball of falafel dough into her hands, patting it flat. “Yeah, I worked for him the last couple of years. This morning I got an email from the office manager.”
“Are they refusing to pay you or something?”
Penny sighed. “No, nothing like that. It was very . . . congenial.” Brett didn't respond, just watched her as he tossed the greens into the bowl. “I know it sounds ridiculous that I'm mad about aniceemail, but when I told Danny I was leaving, it was like he didn't even care. We'd lived together for almost three years, and I helped him build that practice. All I got was a ‘give me your two weeks notice and I'll make sure you get your paperwork.’”
“So you were kind of hoping for a bash fest?”
Penny dropped her hands into the bowl. “He could have at least called me a bitch. That would have been nice,” she muttered.
Brett laughed out loud. “I'll file that away for future reference.”
Penny grinned and popped the first falafel onto the pan. “It just would have felt good to know that any of it meant anything to him, you know? If he’d shownsomeemotion.”
