“I was working.”
“I saw.”
“You replaced my coffee.”
“It was cold.”
She takes a sip from the fresh cup and gives me one look over the rim.
“You’re very pleased with yourself.”
“Yes.”
She smirks. “Well at least you’re honest.”
“I am many things.”
“Don’t start listing them. I need to eat.”
She takes a bite, and I wait despite myself. Her eyes close for a fraction of a second.
She opens her eyes. “Four and a half.”
I stare at her. “For breakfast?”
“For the eggs.”
“Impossible.”
“Ambitious, but not impossible.”
I lean one hand on the counter.
“You’ve become very comfortable insulting me in my own kitchen.”
She looks around the room, then back at me.
“I’m not sure this kitchen objects.”
No, I think. It does not.
She returns to her food, then to her laptop, moving between appetite and work with the same absorbed focus she brings to everything. I start the morning prep on the opposite side of the island because I have deliveries to sort and a restaurant to run, but I find myself looking up too often.
She is at my kitchen island at 8:00 AM with her laptop open and her coffee going cold because she got absorbed in a paragraph and forgot to drink it.
I built this kitchen to my exact specifications. I built it for the work I wanted to do in it. I pick up my knife and begin slicing herbs for the day. I did not know, when I built it, that the best thing in it would be someone sitting at the island telling me the truth about what I put in front of her. I know it now.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Serena
By the final stretch of my last couple of weeks in Paris, my hotel room has become a technicality. I still have the key. I still keep clothes there, a few toiletries, a stack of receipts, and the backup notebook I bought in Lyon because I do not trust myself to travel with only one.
Every few days, I stop by long enough to collect something clean, answer an email in the chair beside the window, or remind myself that I came to Paris as a woman with a room of her own and a return ticket booked. But the room has started to feel like a place I visit between the real parts of my life, and that is a dangerous thing to know about a hotel you are still paying for.
Most mornings now begin at Damien’s kitchen island. Not officially—nothing about it has been discussed with the kind of language that would make either of us feel cornered by it. My laptop simply appears there one morning, then stays. A charger follows. Then my notebook. Then the dark blue cardigan I keep pretending I did not leave on the back of one of his dining chairs on purpose. Damien doesn’t comment on any of it. He only moves the charger once, from the far outlet to the one closer to my preferred stool, and when I look at him, he keeps chopping herbs like he has done nothing worth noticing.
That’s how it happens with him—not in a grand manner, not with speeches, but through placement and through correction. Through coffee appearing before I ask for it, exactly the way I take it, strong enough to matter, not so bitter it has to prove something. Through the way he learns the angle of my mornings without asking me to explain them.
