Elise pressed her hand against her chest in mock offence. "Absolutely not." She had absolutely shoved everything into the spare room.
Sienna's eyes were soft. She reached for Elise's hand and squeezed it. "Thank you."
"Are you hungry? I was going to make lunch. You should sit down and rest while I cook."
Sienna raised an eyebrow. "You are going to cook?"
Elise was already walking toward the kitchen. "I'm going to cook. For you. Right now. Sit down."
"Elise, you can’t cook!”
“I absolutely can.” She pulled ingredients from the fridge with her jaw set in the determined way she approached everything.
Sienna leaned against the sofa's armrest, watching her with open amusement. “I’ll keep the fire department on speed dial.”
"Sit. Down."
Sienna rolled her eyes with a theatrical exasperation that was undermined completely by the smile spreading across her face. She was smiling and she sat on the sofa and tucked her feet up and watched as Elise moved to the kitchen. The open-plan layout kept them in sight of each other from anywhere, Sienna on the sofa and Elise at the counter, and the domesticity of it, the simple, ordinary act of being in the same room while one person rested and the other cooked, was so achingly normal and so impossibly precious that Elise had to pause and press her hands flat on the counter and breathe.
She was home. She was here. She was alive.
"What are you making?" Sienna asked from the sofa.
Elise opened the pantry and pulled out a box of penne. "Pasta."
"Can you make pasta?"
She filled a pot at the tap, water splashing against the stainless steel. "How hard can it be?"
The answer, it turned out, was quite hard. The water took forever to boil. She over-salted it, then tried to fix it by addingmore water, which meant it took even longer to boil again. The pasta went in and she forgot to set a timer and by the time she remembered, the penne had passed al dente and entered a territory she could only describe as compliant. The sauce was from a jar because she was not a fool, but she'd attempted to add garlic and burned it, and the kitchen filled with the acrid smell of charred garlic and Sienna was watching from the sofa with an expression of increasing concern.
"Should I be worried?" Sienna called.
"It's under control."
"It smells like it's under fire."
She plated the overcooked pasta and the too-salty sauce and the burned garlic and scraped the black bits off the bottom of the pan and added a sprig of basil from the pot on the windowsill that Sienna had given her two months ago and that was, miraculously, still alive. She carried both bowls to the sofa with as much dignity as she could manage. They sat together, the bowls on their laps, and Sienna took a bite and her expression went through a rapid sequence: hope, confusion, mild alarm, and then a carefully neutral neutrality that was so transparent Elise burst out laughing.
"It's terrible, isn't it," Elise said.
"It has character."
Elise poked at a blackened piece with her fork. "It has burned garlic."
Sienna chewed and swallowed with visible effort. "The garlic gives it a smoky depth."
Elise snorted. "Liar."
Sienna grinned. The grin became a laugh, quiet at first, then bigger, and then they were both laughing, sitting on the sofa with their terrible pasta and the morning light coming through the windows and three weeks of fear and hospital corridors dissolving into the sound of shared, helpless laughter. Eliselaughed until her stomach ached and Sienna laughed until her ribs protested and she pressed her good hand against her side and gasped and said "Stop, stop making me laugh, it hurts" and Elise couldn't stop and neither could Sienna.
They ate what they could. Sienna managed about half her bowl, which Elise counted as a victory given the quality. They set the bowls on the coffee table and Sienna leaned into Elise's side, her head on Elise's shoulder, her good hand finding Elise's hand, and the laughter faded into a comfortable silence.
"I've been thinking," Sienna said.
Elise kissed the top of her head. "Dangerous."
"I've been thinking about what happens next. About us."
