Page 3 of Cracking with the Mountain Man

Tomorrow morning, I'm walking that plate down to the Kessler cabin. Because returning someone's property is basic decency. Because her grandmother's plate shouldn't sit in a stranger's cabinet. Because it's the right thing to do.

It's just a plate.

CHAPTER TWO

PRIYA

My kitchen smells like failure.

Specifically, it smells like the third attempt at a Hungarian chimney cake that refuses to cooperate with the altitude up here. The dough keeps overproofing, the sugar crust burns before the inside cooks through, and the cabin's ancient oven runs twenty degrees hotter than the dial claims. Nani would have figured it out in one try. She'd have adjusted the sugar, dropped the temperature, maybe added a prayer to Ganesh for good measure, and pulled a perfect golden spiral out of this oven without breaking a sweat.

Nani also spent sixty years baking. So maybe I can give myself some grace on attempt number three.

The chimney cake goes in the compost. The mixing bowl goes in the sink. My laptop sits open on the counter next to a stack of recipe cards written in my grandmother's handwriting, and the cursor blinks on a blank page titled Chapter Seven: Budapest.

Comfort food from around the world. That's the book. Recipes tied to memory, to place, to the feeling of being held by something warm when everything else is falling apart. My publisher liked the concept. My agent loved the advance. My ex husband Vikram loved telling people at dinner parties that his wife was writing a cookbook, which was his favorite thing about me. That I was a wife who did interesting things he could mention between courses.

Four years of marriage to a man who wanted the performance of me. The Indian wife who cooked beautifully, dressed well at faculty events, charmed his department chair. He never once asked what I wanted to write about. He asked what was for dinner.

The divorce was clean. Polite. He got the condo in Toronto. I got the cookbook deal, this leaky A frame in the mountains, and the slow project of figuring out who Priya Sharma is when she's not someone's accessory.

Seven months in, the answer is: a woman with flour in her hair who talks to herself while baking and whose nearest neighbor is a six foot wall of silence who looked at her pie like she'd handed him a live grenade.

Owen Tate.

I asked around town when I first moved in. Betty at the general store said he comes down once a month for supplies, doesn't make small talk, buys canned soup by the case. The woman at the post office said he gets mail under two names and never waves. Sage at the coffee shop on Main, the one with the incredible Jamaican patties, told me he volunteers for search and rescue but otherwise keeps to the mountain.

So yesterday I baked him a pie because that's what you do. That's what Nani taught me. New neighbor, new offering. You bring food because food says what words can't, and most of the time what it says is I'm here and I see you and you don't have to be alone if you don't want to be.

He took the pie. Barely said thank you. Stood there holding a splitting maul with forearms that made me forget the speech I'd rehearsed on the walk up. Gray eyes. Jaw set hard enough to crack walnuts. The kind of body you get from actual labor, from chopping wood and hauling supplies up a mountain on foot.

And a dog. Boone. The sweetest creature on four legs, who looked at me with more warmth in thirty seconds than Owen managed in three minutes.

Fine. Some people don't want neighbors. Some people moved to the top of a mountain specifically to avoid them. Message received.

Except I'm still thinking about it this morning while I scrape burnt chimney cake into the compost, which is irritating.

A knock on my door at half past eight nearly makes me drop the mixing bowl.

Nobody knocks on my door. The mail carrier leaves packages on the porch. The raccoons don't knock. And the only person within walking distance is...

Owen stands on my porch holding my grandmother's pie plate.

He's wearing flannel. Obviously. A different one from yesterday, or maybe he owns twelve of the same. His hair is damp at the temples like he showered before coming, which means he thought about this enough to prepare for it, and that detail lodges somewhere behind my ribs.

Boone sits at his feet, tail going.

"Your plate," he says. Holds it out.

"You could've kept it until you came to town."

"It's your grandmother's."

He says the words as if his own grandmother raised him to know better. There are no water spots on the plate and the chip on the rim has been dried around carefully.

"Thank you." Taking it from him, my fingers brush his. His hands are rough. Warm despite the cold morning air. Something sparks at the contact. Brief, electric. His eyes drop to where our fingers touched, then come back up to my face. "Did you eat the pie?"

His jaw works. "It was fine."