Clara is not family by blood, but she’s been crossing my kitchen like this since before Maria died. She came twice a week then; she started coming more in the months afterward without me asking. She never stayed long. She never asked questions. She just replaced chaos with order and made sure I ate.
She pours ladles of batter on the griddle with the confidence of a woman who has done it a thousand times. She sprinkles a pinch of cinnamon I forgot to add, tilts her head at the smell, and approves.
“You have eggs. Good. Scrambled?”
“Soft,” I say. “She—” I stop. I don’t finish that sentence because I don’t have the data to back it up. “Soft is easier.”
“Soft is gentle,” Clara says, like that decides something beyond eggs. She moves to the fridge and grabs strawberries, a handful of mint, the good yogurt. “Chocolate, fruit, eggs, bread. Juice.”
“Orange and pomegranate.”
“Mm.” She eyes the bottle. “You will kill her with kindness. Brava.”
I slide the eggs into the pan and work them with a silicone spatula, slow sweeps that push curds into themselves until they’re barely set. The chocolate in the small pot has melted, glossy and thick. I cut it with a little more milk until it flows like a ribbon.
The smell folds into the room and tugs a memory out of me that I wasn’t expecting or looking for: Maria’s laugh in our first apartment when I tried to make crêpes and turned out something that looked like a mountain range. I shelve it. Not now. Not this morning.
“I don’t want you to be here when she wakes,” I say and wince at the way it came out.
Clara lifts an eyebrow. “Ah.”
“She’s… shy,” I add, and I hate that word because it’s not right, but I need something to convey the nuance. “I don’t want it to be awkward.”
Clara turns a pancake with one practiced flick and gives me a sidelong look that says she’s fifty percent amused, fifty percent pleased. “Shy,” she repeats, tasting the word for any lie in it. “Or private.”
“Private,” I agree. “And last night was… a lot.”
“For both of you,” she says, not a question.
“For both of us.”
She nods. “Okay, okay. I will not be the dragon guarding the kitchen, eh?”
She flips another pancake, then lowers the flame under the griddle and kills the heat under the eggs with a twist that annoys me only because it’s correct. I was going to do it. “But I will feed her before I go.”
She’s already moving toward the cabinet with the good china. She comes back with plates, silverware, then detours to another cabinet. The porcelain mug with the blue rim appears, the small teapot I bought because she told me to buy it, and the linen napkins I forget I own until she presses them into my hand.
“Use the tray,” she says, not looking, already spooning eggs into a bowl and smoothing the top as if it matters. It does to her.
I pull the big walnut tray from the pantry and set it on the counter. I line it with a folded runner because Clara would want it that way. She arranges plates like a general setting troop lines—eggs front and center, pancakes stacked but not high enough to tip over, syrup in the small pitcher, butter in a ramekin with a curl carved into the top, strawberries sliced and fanned. She tucks mint onto the rim of the juice glass. She sets up the tea along the side, a small pot and little cups.
All in a fraction of the time it would’ve taken me.
“You forgot water,” she says, and pushes a glass at me. I fill it with filtered, set it left of the eggs. “And salt,” she adds. I put the little dish of flaky salt on the tray.
Clara fusses with the napkin for a second, lifts it, lays it back down, nods to herself, and steps away. “There,” she says. “Even if she wakes with the devil on her shoulder, he will have to wait while she eats.”
“Grazie,” I say. The word is small for what I mean. I mean: thank you for being the kind of woman who knows what a morning like this needs. Thank you for teasing me instead of judging me. Thank you for making my house feel human.
“Go, vai. I will clean this and go.”
“You can just leave it. I’ll get to it later.”
She flicks her towel at my hip the way she does when she wants me to get out of her space. “Go!”
Knowing better than to argue, I reach for the tray.
“And Roberto?”
