“Okay, Chef Ramsey, no false modesty needed. You’re ridiculously good at everything apparently.”
"Humor me."
She considered. "Okay. So this guy comes in today. Business suit, Bluetooth earpiece, the whole insufferable package. He orders a—and I quote—'oat milk cortado with a half-pump of sugar-free vanilla, two ice cubes, extra foam, but not too foamy, in a twelve-ounce cup but only filled to the eight-ounce line.'"
“Sounds like a hostage negotiation.”
"Right? And when I hand it to him, he takes one sip and goes, 'This tastes different than it did yesterday.' He's never been in before. I've never seen this man in my life. He's confusing us with another shop."
"What did you do?"
"I smiled and remade it. Then I went to the back and silently screamed into a bag of French roast."
I set a cutting board on the counter. "The silent scream into dry goods. Classic coping mechanism."
"Don't mock my process."
The delivery was funny—her timing always was—but the edges were soft tonight. No performance. No sharpened wit deployed as armor. Just Willow, worn down and willing to be ordinary in my kitchen, and that ordinariness was more intimate than any kiss we'd almost shared.
I cooked. She watched. Fell quiet for stretches, then circled back with observations that had nothing to do with what we'd been talking about—the way the city looked from this angle at dusk, whether pigeons had a leader or operated on collective anarchy, if I thought anyone had ever actually finished readingUlyssesor if humanity was collectively faking it.
Normal. Easy. Conversation that settled into the gaps between two people who were running out of excuses to keep each other at arm's length.
The domesticity of it should have alarmed me. It did. I minced the garlic and ignored every alarm bell ringing in my skull.
After dinner—a simpleaglio e oliothat she'd proclaimed "unreasonably good" while scraping the bowl—she curled onto the sectional with the leather-boundPride and PrejudiceI'd bought her inHartfield. Feet tucked beneath her. The book propped against a pillow—the gray one, naturally, the one she'd liberated from decorative duty.
I set up at the kitchen island with my laptop. The Riverside sustainability report needed finishing. The shading calculations for the western facade were overdue. I had legitimate, pressing, revenue-dependent work to accomplish.
I opened the file. Read the same paragraph three times. Closed the file.
Over the laptop screen, I watched her read.
She had a habit I'd noticed in Hartfield—her mouth moved faintly as she tracked the sentences, lips forming shapes around Austen's prose. She'd sink deeper into the cushions by degrees, as if the couch were absorbing her. One hand held the book; the other rested against her collarbone, fingers tapping an absent rhythm I suspected she wasn't aware of.
Her eyelids grew heavier. The tapping slowed. The book tilted in her loosening hold, pages fanning, until it came to rest spine-up on her sternum.
She was out.
I closed the laptop.
Watched her sleep, and knew I should stop. Knew this was behavior that crossed lines I'd drawn with my own hand this morning.Platonic.That had been the agreement. A sensible, necessary, adult decisionbetween two people who were already in over their heads.
But in sleep, Willow shed every defense she carried while awake. No sharp comeback loaded. No self-deprecating joke at the ready. No bright performance to convince the world she wasn't scared. She was just—there. In my space. Trusting it enough to let go.
No one had trusted me with that in eight years.
Jessica had slept facing away from me in the last years of our marriage. A wall of back and shoulder, the topography of a woman who'd stopped believing I deserved her vulnerability. And she'd been right. I hadn't earned it. I'd been too consumed by the next project, the next proposal, the next building that would stand long after my marriage had collapsed into rubble.
Willow Monroe was asleep on my couch with a nineteenth-century novel rising and falling on her chest, and she'd given me her unguarded self without a second thought, and I wanted to be worth that. Wanted it in a way that had nothing to do with arrangements or contracts or age gaps.
This was a problem.
I should wake her. Guide her to the guest room. Maintain the boundary.
Instead, I moved to the couch. Sat on the edge with care, keeping space between us. The cushion shiftedunder me and she stirred—not awake, not asleep. Suspended in that liminal place where the body responds on instinct and the brain hasn't caught up.
She scooted toward me. Toward warmth, toward proximity, the way a person reaches for solid ground when the floor tips. Her arm reached around me, settling against me, cuddled against my side like she belonged there. My arm instinctively made room for her.
