“Who’s Margaret?” Tyler asked.
“She’s known me since I was a kid,” Hunter explained to Tyler. “Kind of a mother to me.”
“Where was your real mom?”
“She left when I was ten,” Hunter said.
“Oh, that sucks,” Tyler said.
“Yeah. But I have Margaret. Her mother passed this recipe on to her and then she passed it to me.”
“And now you’ll pass it on to me,” Tyler said.
Pass it on to me?The longing in my son’s voice made my stomach clench.
“Margaret thinks all men should learn to cook,” Hunter said.
“In case they marry an author?” I asked.
“I think some authors cook, Mom.”
“Yay for them.” I climbed onto a barstool at the island and accepted my role in this production, which was clearly to drink wine.
Tyler and Hunter settled into a nice rhythm. My son knew where everything was, obviously, so fetched whatever Hunter asked for. The whole room filled with warmth and the smell of garlic and crisping pancetta.
“Should we put on music?” I asked.
“I made a playlist,” Tyler said enthusiastically. “Just in case Hunter stayed for dinner.”
Just in case? My son was definitely not out of the matchmaking game.
Tyler connected his phone to the speaker.
“This is Hunter Sloan’s greatest hits,” Tyler said. “I found a whole list online of every hit song you’ve written. There are a lot of them.”
“Sixty-one,” Hunter said. “That made it into the top twenty anyway.”
I looked up. “Sixty-one? No way.”
“It’s a popular number, I guess,” Hunter said, smiling at me as the first song came on.
Tyler started asking questions about the songs and the artists who recorded them. Hunter answered them all, seemingly unbothered by my son’s curiosity.
“How do you think of your ideas?” Tyler asked.
I was often asked the same thing about my books.
“Different ways. Sometimes a line will just pop into my head and I build the whole song around it.” Hunter added the pasta to the boiling pot, stirring as he spoke. “Or sometimes it’s something painful from my life, and the only way to get through it is to make it a song.” He looked at me. “Is it like that for you?”
I nodded. “In that writing can be cathartic, yes. Especially if you get it just right.”
The song changed.
I knew it in the first three notes.
Already Gone (But Still Here).
Ivy James’s voice filled my kitchen. I closed my eyes for a moment, her voice as pure and pretty as anything I’d ever heard in this world. “Perfection,” I said under my breath.
