Patient Alpha.
Am I jealous when Matteo gets to put his mouth on her temple in passing. Of course I am. The jealousy is the price of the strategy. The patience is the strategy. I am, in this kitchen on this Tuesday at four-twenty in the afternoon, doing the patientthing the patient way, and I have, at no point, allowed myself to imagine that the patience would be repaid as quickly as it is about to be.
“So. Captain.” Iris pads around to the front of the island, leans her elbows onto the marble, props her chin on her palms. “What is the man cooking.”
“Grandpa’s stew.”
“Your grandpa’s stew.”
“My grandpa’s stew.”
“Is that a brand name, like a restaurant, or is this a literal grandpa’s recipe.”
“Literal.” I tap the lid back onto the pot, lift it, glance at the bubbling. Lower the heat by an eighth. “Maternal side. My grandfather wrote it down for me on the back of an envelope when I was twelve, and I have been making it ever since. Two pounds of chuck. Three carrots. Two onions. A handful of pearl barley. Rosemary, thyme, two bay leaves. A generous slug of Guinness. A small splash of red wine. Slow heat for three hours.”
She inhales, theatrically, then closes her eyes and inhales again, less theatrically.
Oh, Pinky. That noise you just made is a problem.
“I am just,” she announces, eyes still closed, “checking for poison.”
“Do a thorough job. Take your time.”
“Oh my God.” Eyes open. The grey of them is, in the warm overhead kitchen light, doing the soft awed thing the rest of her face is too proud to do. “Jude. Genuinely. When was the last time I had a cooked meal that took a person three hours.”
“Mm.”
She does not answer the question immediately. The hesitation is, in itself, the answer. I keep my eyes on the pot and let her find the rest of the sentence at her own pace.
“Years,” she finally says, quietly. “Genuinely years. My mum used to make a Sunday roast like it was a religious obligation. Beef brisket, the whole production. When I was little, my parents loved my striving, my drive, my hockey-obsessed energy. They would make me a victory roast after a win. Yorkshire puddings the size of my head.”
“And it fell out.”
“It fell out.”
She does not elaborate. She has told me the rest of it in her own time and in her own pieces — the moment she presented Omega, the slow withdrawal of the family infrastructure that had been her entire support system. The cooked meals had, at some point in there, simply stopped being made.
“I suspect,” she adds, with the small offhand-cruel humor of a person who has thought about it more than she ever lets on, “it is also the case that my mum and dad have, somewhere in the last few years, fallen out of love with each other. Which is the kind of thing that takes the cooking out of a person before anything else does.”
“Mm,” I say, level. “I can see how that might do it.”
There is a beat where she watches me stir. The kitchen island holds the slow steam of the pot in the warm shaft of late-afternoon light from the window over the sink, and the silence is the kind that, in this house, is acceptable.
“Is that,” I venture, carefully, “why you read the books you read.”
Her head tilts. “The books I read.”
“The cozy ones. The romance ones. The Knottingley one.”
She laughs.
Properly. A full surprised laugh, the kind that you only get out of her when you have caught her sideways, and her grey eyes flash up at me with the bright pleased amusement of a womanwho has just realized she has been observed more closely than she budgeted for.
“How on earth did you see I was readingthat?”
“Movie night.” I shrug, dropping the spoon back into the pot. “Rémi carried you upstairs. Your Kindle fell out of your hoodie pocket on the way through the living room. Matteo picked it up. The book on the screen was titled, and I quote,Knottingley Ever After.
“Matteo,” Iris says, with the resigned warmth of a woman cataloguing a known threat, “is a snitch.”
