It fit.
The afternoon was slow. That was the thing I'd been learning about Nadia since we got back to each other. She moved fast at work, fast in a crisis, fast when something needed doing.
But left alone in a space with no immediate demands on her, she went still in a way that was almost surprising. She could read for two hours without surfacing. She could sit on a kitchen counter with a coffee and watch the garden and not feel the need to fill the silence with anything.
I liked that about her more than I'd known how to say.
We made dinner in the small kitchen, working around each other with the ease of practice. She did the prep automatically, her knife work clean and fast, with no wasted movement.
I handled the pan because she claimed my heat management was the one thing I did better than her, which I suspected was a deliberate concession to keep me useful.
Sofia knocked at six, delivered a small container of something she said was extra but which I suspected she'd made specifically, accepted a glass of wine, and was back in her own kitchen in eleven minutes.
A record, even for her.
After dinner we ended up on the narrow couch with the lamp on and the cats watching, Nadia's legs across my lap, her book open but not being read.
"Can I ask you something?" she said.
"Yeah."
"Your mom." She kept her voice measured, not careful exactly, but considered. She'd learned when to be direct and when to come at things from an angle, and this was an angle. "You've told me what happened. What you felt like after. But you've never told me what she was like."
I looked at the lamp. The ceramic cats on the shelf across from us had their usual expressions, which amounted to polite neutrality.
"She was funny," I said. "Not obviously. In the way where you'd be halfway through something else entirely and then you'd realize what she'd said three minutes ago was the funniest thing you'd ever heard."
I thought about it. "She was a terrible cook. She knew she was a terrible cook, and she didn't care at all. She made this chicken every Sunday that was technically inedible, and she was very proud of it."
Nadia smiled without looking up from the page she wasn't reading. "What made it inedible?"
"She added things. The recipe would say garlic, and she'd add garlic, then add more because she felt the recipe had underestimated the situation, then add something else entirely that didn't belong there on any level."
"What sort of something else?"
"Cinnamon. Once." I let that land. "She said she'd misread the label."
Nadia put the book face-down on her stomach and looked at me with the expression of a woman who had devoted her professional life to food. "Cinnamon."
"In the chicken."
"And you ate it."
"Every Sunday for twenty-two years." I fell silent as I remembered the seasons. "It was important to her. She'd made it. It didn't matter that it was bad. You ate the food someone made you with their whole heart."
Nadia was quiet for a bit. Then she said, "She sounds like someone I would have liked."
The thing about that sentence was that she meant it practically. Not as comfort, not as the thing you said. She meant it the way she meant most things, as a direct result of the evidence.
"She would have liked you," I said. "She had very little patience for nonsense, and she respected people who could run things. She would have come to one of your events and told everyone she'd known you for years."
"That's a very specific compliment."
"It's accurate."
She put her legs down and turned to sit sideways, her back against the arm of the couch, facing me. Not readying herself for a serious conversation. Just repositioning. She looked at me with the attention she had when she was about to say something she'd been sitting with for a while.
"I think you should go back," she said. "To the cemetery. Not because you have anything left to fix, but because she's there, and you're here, and you don't have to keep it separate now if you don't want to."
