I try to replicate the motion. The onion slides sideways and nearly rolls off the cutting board.
"Okay," Cat says, and I can hear the smile in her voice. "Maybe we start with something less... slippery."
She moves to the stove, where olive oil is already heating in a massive pan. "The thing about ratatouille is that everyone thinks it's just vegetables in a pot. Throw it all together, let it simmer, done. But that's not ratatouille. That's vegetable mush."
"And vegetable mush is bad?"
"Vegetable mush is a crime against Provence." She adds garlic to the oil, and the kitchen fills with a smell so good my stomach actually growls. "Real ratatouille, you cook each vegetable separately. You layer the flavors. You treat each ingredient with respect."
I watch her hands as she works—the quick, confident movements, the way she tilts the pan to spread the oil, the easy grace of someone completely in their element. Her hands are beautiful, I realize. Strong and capable, with short nails and a small scar across one knuckle I've never noticed before.
I wonder how she got that scar. I wonder what else I don't know about her.
"You're staring," Cat says without looking up.
Heat floods my face. "I'm observing. There's a difference."
"Is there?"
"Observation is educational. Staring is—" I stop, not sure how to finish that sentence.
"Staring is what?" She glances at me over her shoulder, one eyebrow raised, and there's something in her expression that makes my stomach flip. Challenge, maybe. Or amusement. Or something else entirely.
"Never mind." I turn back to my massacred onion. "What do I do with this?"
"Scrape it into the bowl with the others. We'll pretend it's supposed to look like that."
"Your confidence in me is overwhelming."
"I'm an optimist." She grins, and God, that grin. It transforms her whole face, lights her up from the inside. I've been seeing it more often lately—not the polite smile she gave me when I first arrived, but this real one, this warm one. I didn't realize until now how much I was waiting for it.
We work in silence for a while, Cat managing the stove while I prep vegetables under her increasingly amused supervision. The late afternoon sun slants through the windows, turning everything gold. The kitchen smells like herbs and olive oil and home—though I'm not sure when I started thinking of this place as home.
"Can I ask you something?" I say, scraping peppers into a bowl.
"You can ask. I reserve the right not to answer."
"Fair." I set down my knife, turning to face her. "Why did you leave London? The real reason, not the 'I needed a break' version."
Cat's hands still on the pan. For a moment, I think she's not going to answer.
"Burnout," she says finally. "The kind that sneaks up on you until one day you're standing in a walk-in freezer at two in the morning, crying over a sauce that won't reduce, and you realize you can't remember the last time you enjoyed any of it."
"That sounds..."
"Pathetic?"
"I was going to say familiar."
She looks at me then, really looks, and I see something shift in her expression. Recognition, maybe. The particular understanding of someone who knows exactly what you mean.
"The restaurant closed six months ago," she continues, turning back to the stove. "Not my fault—the owners were in over their heads, made some bad investments, the whole thing went under. But I'd been barely holding on for a year before that. Twelve-hour days, six days a week. No social life. No relationships—well, one relationship, but she left."
"She?"
"Janeen. My ex." Cat's voice is carefully neutral. "We were together for two years. She got offered a job in Sydney, asked me to come with her. I said no—couldn't leave the restaurant, couldn't abandon my post. So she went without me." A pause. "Sometimes I think I didn't really say no to Sydney. I said no to her. To the possibility of being happy."
The words land somewhere tender in my chest. I know that feeling—the way ambition becomes an excuse, the way achievement becomes a wall. I've been building walls my whole life.
