“To do what?”
“Shortbread.” Edie made finer and finer crumbs gravel through her fingers, realizing that her decision to mix up shortbread had been a bad mistake. She made amazing, award-winning shortbread, but also, she had made shortbread every day for Fauxmage. Taking her body through the motions of this task had quickly turned into genuine psychological torture that she’d only identified when Cosima burst into the kitchen. She felt dreadful, like a creature that dwelled at the bottom of a well.
Cosima sat down at the work table, folding her hands. “And you’re making shortbread because?”
“Because I wanted to make shortbread. If you’re going to sit there when it’s getting late enough that I’m going to be caught and then thrown out and have to sleep in the greenhouse, then you could make yourself useful and zest that lemon.”
Cosima surveyed the work table. “This lemon?”
“Any lemon.” Edie blew out a breath. “But yes, that one, because I washed it.”
“I don’t know how to do what you’re asking.”
The admission somewhat deflated Edie’s effort to keep this conversation brisk and far, far away from her feelings. She tookher hands out of the bowl and pushed the Microplane grater across the space between them. “I’m asking you to zest.”
Cosima picked up the plane, the tool in one hand, lemon in the other. “And zesting is?”
Edie sighed—sighed out all of the air in her lungs—and brushed off her hands into the bowl. She walked around the football-pitch-sized table and arrived at Cosima’s side, where she took the lemon and the grater from her, then stroked the lemon a few times over the plane, making a teaspoon’s worth of fluffy zest fall onto the table. “Removing the zest. Just the yellow part, none of the pith, the white part. Move the lemon around and go in one direction.”
“Thank you.” Cosima held out her hands for the plane and the lemon. When Edie gave them to her, she made an experimental stroke with the lemon. “Oh! Look at that!” She pointed at the twenty-five flakes of zest she’d made.
“Well-done, chef.”
Edie returned to her station. She dripped coconut milk into her mixture and started folding it with her hands, and when it was three or four folds from being ready, she glanced across the table at Cosima. “I’m ready for your zest.”
Cosima held up a tea saucer with a perfect pyramid of yellow flakes. She stood up on the rungs of her stool and bent over the table, holding out the saucer until Edie could grasp it. Which she did, for a moment—before it slipped through her buttery fingers to break on the edge of the bowl.
Saucer shards rained down into her shortbread dough, ruining it.
“Very seriously fuck this in so many different directions.” She put her head down on her arms on the work table and smelled lemon zest and butter, a sensory reminder of a full year of hope and failure.
“Sit down,” Cosima said. “Give yourself a moment.”
“No. I have to hide the evidence.”
“Just let me,” Cosima said. “Morag won’t suspect a thing. Essentially all I did for my mother was clean up messes.”
It was a comment that struck Edie as not entirely aligned with how Cosima had spoken of her life before. What kind of messes had she been cleaning up?
She watched Cosima roll up her sleeves and pick up the pieces of the saucer to make a stack. She found a bench scraper next to the bowl. “I’ve seen chefs during events use these to clean the area?”
“Go for it.”
Cosima scraped the counter, then pulled a paper grocery bag from the recycling to dump crumbs and zest into. She wiped down the coconut milk carton and wrung out a rag over and over with hot water to clean the table until there was nothing left but a folded-up bag of Edie’s crimes and clean dishes on the draining board.
“Whatisit that you do?” Edie accepted the glass of Ribena that Cosima poured for her. “And forgive me if it’s rude to presume you do anything.”
Cosima dried the bowl and nested it with others on a shelf. “I’m the acting board chair for Phoebe Frank Studios.”
“What does the board chair do?”
“I make a decision about anything that anyone thinks my mother would have had an opinion on. Before, I didn’t have an official title, I just did whatever she didn’t want to, and kept people from doing things that she wouldn’t like or that would make her upset.”
Cosima folded the tea towel in a perfect square and put it on the table before pouring her own glass of juice. Her voice had gone flat.
What Cosima had just described—that wasn’t a job description. Thatwasa mess, probably toxic, definitely treacherous. Somewhere in what Cosima was saying and not saying, Edie guessed, was the secret she’d gotten angry with Morag about. Edie wasn’t sure she wanted to know what it was.
That was a lie. She wanted to know desperately.
