“Uh-huh. And you’ve been ’observing’ him for twenty minutes while ignoring everyone else because…?”
“Professional interest in the competition format.”
“Sloane, you just leaned forward when he rolled up his sleeves. Professional interest doesn’t involve cardiovascular events.”
I didn’t answer. Instead, I watched his hands work the dough and tried not to think about his hands.
The dough went into a pie dish.
My heart did not stutter. My heart made a sound like a car alarm going off in a quiet neighborhood — sudden, inappropriate, impossible to ignore.
He was making pie. Apple pie, thinly sliced fruit in careful concentric circles, and my brain connected the dots with a force that was physical. A few weeks ago, during a camera break, I’d mentioned my grandmother’s recipe in a throwaway tangent — not even part of my prepared remarks, just a slip about comfort and nostalgia and the taste of being loved without conditions. I’d thought it was just noise. Verbal filler that got lost in the flood.
But Rhys hadn’t been transcribing. He’d been listening.
I watched him reach for the cinnamon — the secret, the thing that made my grandmother’s version different from every other apple pie — and a fissure opened somewhere behind my ribs. The corner of his mouth lifted. Not a smile — three weeks of intensive field study had established that Rhys didn’t do those — but a half-second of satisfaction, quickly suppressed. I caught it anyway. And my stupid, traitorous heart lurched forward like a dog spotting its owner, and I had to grip the edge of the observation window to keep my face neutral.
“Oh no,” Tessa said quietly.
Yeah. Oh no.
The tasting was supposed to be theatrical — each contestant presenting their creation while I offered diplomatic feedback on camera. In practice, it was two hours of pretending lobster thermidor was a reasonable interpretation of “comfort food” andtrying not to laugh when Mason presented his definitely-not-ordered-from-down-the-street margherita with the confidence of chaos as a lifestyle choice.
And then it was Rhys’s turn.
He set the pie down without ceremony. No elaborate presentation, no speech about his culinary philosophy. Just a pie in a simple dish, golden-brown crust slightly darker at the edges than it should have been, steam carrying the unmistakable scent of cinnamon and brown sugar and — underneath — Sunday afternoons in a Connecticut kitchen. Flour-dusted countertops. Her hands guiding mine to crimp the edges with a fork. And beneath all of it, a trace that was just him — soap, clean cotton, a scent you’d have to be standing too close to detect, which meant I was standing too close.
I stared too long. My brain recognized what it was seeing but refused to process it, how you stare at a word you’ve read a thousand times and it briefly stops making sense. Apple pie. Lattice crust. Deliberately burnt edges. My grandmother’s cinnamon. Each detail resolved — a photograph developing, and each one made the next harder to breathe through.
“You made apple pie,” I said, and my voice came out strange.
“You mentioned it.” He stood with his arms crossed, expression giving nothing, but his eyes were locked on mine with an intensity that made me feel X-rayed. “Once. A few weeks ago.”
“And you remembered.”
“I was listening.”
A tendon tightened in his throat when he said it — the only crack in his composure, as if the admission had cost him. Three words that shouldn’t have been devastating, but they were, because they were the opposite of everything I’d experienced before. Every man who’d half-heard me and filled in the blankswith what he wanted. Every date where I’d shared a piece of myself and watched it skip off the surface of a man’s attention like a stone across water. I was listening. As if it were obvious. As if it were the minimum. As if it were the only thing that had ever mattered.
And here was Rhys — the man who acted like being here was a burden he was grudgingly enduring — standing in front of me with a pie he’d made from a memory I’d shared in passing.
I took a bite.
Cinnamon hit first, sharp and warm. Then apples, soft, yielding. And underneath — the taste of my grandmother’s kitchen. Being small and loved and completely safe in a world that hadn’t yet taught me that wanting too much was a character flaw. For one long, terrifying moment, I had nothing clever to say. No sardonic commentary, no mental list of reasons this didn’t mean what it obviously meant. Just the taste. Just the memory. Just the quiet, undeniable proof that this man had been paying attention when I thought no one was.
My throat closed. My eyes burned. I blinked rapidly — you are not going to become a viral meme of a woman sobbing into baked goods on national television, Sloane, you are not — but it was a losing battle. Because it was proof that Rhys, for all his sharp edges and maintained distance, had heard a throwaway sentence and held onto it like it mattered. Like I mattered.
“The crust is burnt on the edges,” he said, and there was nothing apologetic in his tone — just quiet satisfaction. “Deliberately. You said your grandmother always burnt hers because she got distracted telling stories. You said the burnt parts were your favorite because they tasted like being loved.”
I had said that. In a rambling tangent about comfort food, I’d said exactly that, and he hadn’t just remembered thewords. He’d understood them. He’d turned a confession about imperfection into intention.
Across the room, Derek was watching us with his perfect smile frozen in place — but the calculation behind it was visible now — a mask slipped half an inch. Julian was flipping through his notes, searching for the moment he’d missed the point. And Mason had stopped eating his pizza mid-bite, eyes moving between us with the slow, dawning expression of a man witnessing a love story click into place. He caught me looking and mouthed holy shit with such genuine delight that I laughed.
None of them mattered. Only cinnamon on my tongue and Rhys watching me like my reaction to this pie was the most important data point he’d ever collected.
“Thank you,” I said, and the word felt too small. “This is… no one’s ever…”
“I told you.” His voice was quiet, pitched for me alone, cutting through the noise of crew and contestants and rolling cameras. “I listen. I’ve been listening since the first night.”
