"This ends here."
"There's always a next time, Dante. That's how family works." A pause. "But this one I do for free because she matters to you, and you matter to me."
The line goes quiet.
I set the phone face down on the table.
Cole is still at the sink, his hands moving through the dishes.
"It's done," I say.
He keeps washing.
"I know," he says.
Upstairs, the bedroom door opens. Footsteps cross the ceiling.
Maya's bare feet on the hardwood, moving from the bedroom to the top of the stairs.
Chapter 31
Maya
Tonight, I am cooking dinner in Dante’s jersey.
The home navy. Number eighty-eight. The mesh hangs past my thighs and swallows my shoulders, the sleeves rolled twice and still loose around my wrists. I found it on the hook behind the bedroom door when I was getting dressed, and my hands had already pulled it over my head before my brain caught up.
It smells like the rink, like cold rubber and athletic tape under the cedar soap that clings to everything he owns. I didn’t think about it. I put it on. They cook for me every night.
The ritual has settled into the house so completely that my spot on the counter has a faint wear mark from my jeans, a detail Dante pointed out last week before tapping the spot twice like he had put it there himself. They cook, I sit, I drink wine, and thekitchen belongs to them. Dante owns the stove. Cole owns the cutting board. Between them, there are near misses, hip checks, and those easy, unconscious touches that happen without either of them looking first.
Tonight I’m cooking.
The Frozen Four semifinal is next Thursday. They should be resting, eating clean, watching film. Instead they’re going to eat my pasta and pretend it doesn’t taste like a fire hazard.
I start with pasta because pasta is simple. Water, heat, noodles. The instructions are on the box, and I can read instructions. I have decoded financial fraud documents, FOIA requests, and the filing systems of municipal court records. I can boil water.
The water is boiling. I add the pasta. I set the timer.
So far, competence.
The sauce is where things go wrong.
The recipe comes from a website with a four-star rating that I now suspect was inflated by bots. Diced tomatoes, garlic, basil, olive oil, red pepper flakes. I have all of these things because Dante keeps the kitchen stocked with a specificity that borders on obsession. I dice the tomatoes. The pieces are uneven, some the size of my thumbnail, some the size of a golf ball, but the recipe did not specify dimensions, so I consider this an acceptable variance.
The garlic defeats me immediately.
The clove refuses to peel. I try the method I’ve seen Dante use a hundred times, the side of the knife, one firm press, the casual kitchen violence that always obeys him and immediately betrays me. The clove shoots across the counter, drops off the edge, and rolls under the refrigerator with the calm confidence of something that never intended to cooperate with me in the first place.
I get another clove and attempt it again. This time the press works, but the blade slips and nicks my finger, a small cut, barely bleeding, but enough to make me swear and stick my finger in my mouth and glare at the stove like it has personally wronged me.
“Something’s burning,” Cole says from the doorway.
I turn. The olive oil in the pan is smoking, aggressively. The smoke rises in a column that is two seconds from triggering the detector Cole disabled last month after I burned toast for the third time.
“It’s not burning. It’s heating.”
“It’s on fire.”
