Her mouth twitched. “Smartass. We’re drinking it.”
“Good. Because if you were planning to cook with a bottle over twenty bucks, I’d have to revoke your legal license.”
She breezed past me into the apartment without waiting for an invite. She knew she didn’t need one. Janine still lived in our childhood home. Even after all these years, I had trouble going back there, facing the memories. So my place had become our unofficial neutral zone. She knew this space as well as I did.
Her oversized bag hit the counter with a familiar thud. Without asking, she opened the cabinet above the sink and pulled out the corkscrew—the vintage one she’d gifted me when I landed the internship at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab.
“You still using this thing?” she asked.
“It works, doesn’t it?”
“It has earned a decent burial.”
“It has at least another five years in it.”
She grinned at that, teeth flashing in a tired face. “Only if you open one bottle per year.”
I wandered into the kitchen and leaned on the island while she opened the wine. She knew not to touch the sea salt. She knew which knives were off-limits and which cutting board I considered sacrilege for raw meat. The fact that she still remembered—after all these years, all these late nights, all the takeout cartons we’d once survived on—meant more than I could say.
Cooking together was our language. It always had been. We tried to have dinner together at least once every couple weeks. I was excited about it every time, and tonight was no exception.
We slipped into our usual rhythm, the kind that came from years of necessity, not trend. Side by side in the kitchen—me at the stove, Janine at the chopping board—we moved like old dance partners who’d learned each other’s steps back when grief was still raw and rent was paid in sacrifices.
She hummed some old Lauryn Hill tune she used to blast on Sunday mornings while scrubbing our home in Brooklyn. The air filled with the scent of shallots sweating gently in butter, the kind of aroma that made my mouth water every time. My knife worked its way through a pile of asparagus with quick, even thuds, and the chicken sizzled on the stove.
“You’re doing the plating,” she announced, flicking a slice of zucchini onto the tray I’d laid out. “You always make it look fancy.”
“That’s because you just dump everything in there, with no respect for structure.”
“It does the job, doesn’t it?”
I shook my head, genuinely offended. “There’s more to food than just filling your belly.”
“You’re such a food snob, baby brother.”
She let out a laugh, the kind that crinkled her eyes and made her toss her head the way she used to when we were kids and she’d finally beaten me at Scrabble with a word like ‘jurisprudence.’
God, I missed that sound.
It didn’t happen often anymore. These days, her laughs were softer, more measured, diluted by courtroom fatigue and too many nights spent with crime scene photos instead of people. I worried about her.
By the time we sat down, the kitchen smelled like a five-star restaurant. Lemon zest cut through the richness of butter, thyme clung to the steam rising from the roasted vegetables, and the chicken—pan-seared, then finished in the oven—gleamed with a citrus glaze I’d tweaked three times until it tasted of perfection.
Janine poured the wine, a red so dark it was almost purple, and settled across from me at the small dining table. She kicked off her shoes under the table, nudging one foot against mine—an old habit, leftover from when we both needed comfort without having to say it out loud.
“How’s the Sanchez case?” I asked, lifting my fork.
She paused, taking a sip of her wine. “Frustrating. The judge pushed our hearing back another week. Still waiting on evidence paperwork.” She shook her head. “My client deserves better than bureaucratic delays.”
I nodded. “You’ll get him through it. You always do.” I took a bite of lasagna. “Remember that mock trial when you were in law school? The one about criminalizing poverty?”
Her expression softened. “God, I was so nervous. You stayed up until two in the morning listening to me practice my closing argument.”
“You didn’t need the practice. You had the whole courtroom crying by the end.”
She allowed herself a small, proud smile. “I remember. You waited up for me with coffee that night.” The corners of her mouth lifted. “You’ve always been my little anchor, Sebastian.”
My chest tightened. “You were mine too.” Before I could turn too sentimental, I raised my glass in a toast. “To Janine. The best cook, the better human, and the only reason I’m not in jail or coding at some hedge fund.”
