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“If you’re cooking with your feelings, I’m going to need another burner,” I said, turning toward the pantry.

Sergei paused and then resumed kneading. “What are you making?”

“Pasta e ceci.”

He looked at the ingredients I began gathering. Chickpeas, garlic, a small can of tomatoes, rosemary, ditalini, olive oil.

“That is a great deal of starch besides dumplings.”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t realize emotional repression had nutritional guidelines.”

“It should.”

“Of course you think that.”

My mother had taught me to make pasta e ceci before I was tall enough to see into the pot without standing on a chair. She called it cupboard food because it came from the things a family still had after the refrigerator stopped being cooperative. Garlic browned slowly in olive oil. Tomatoes crushed by hand. Chickpeas, rosemary, water, and whatever small pasta waited at the back of the pantry. Sometimes she used broken spaghetti. Sometimes she added cheese if there was any left. There was no recipe, only a series of instructions delivered while she pushed my fingers away from the hot stove and complained that I chopped garlic like I had a personal grudge against it.

I began slicing.

Sergei glanced at my knife work. “Your pieces are uneven.”

“My mother always said food tastes better when it knows a human being made it.”

“That’s fair.”

“She also said men who criticized a woman’s garlic should cook their own dinner.”

I looked at him, and he just stared back. Then he smirked and got back to work on his own dough.

Soon the kitchen filled with sound: the soft strike of my knife against the cutting board, the low hiss of garlic entering warm oil, Sergei’s knuckles pressing into dough, folding and turning until the rough mass became smooth beneath his hands. Outside, rain began tapping against the windows again, and the guards changed position in the rear lane. One man passed the glass, checked the gate, and disappeared again.

Inside, the smell of garlic and rosemary mixed with onion, meat, flour, and the clean heat of boiling water. It made the townhouse feel lived in, and I liked that.

Sergei covered the dough with a towel to rest, then began preparing the filling. He minced the onion so finely it nearly disappeared into the meat.

“My mom would have liked this kitchen,” I said. “She liked counters she could spread out on. Nonna’s kitchen was always full of decorative things she considered necessary even though they just got in everyone’s way.”

“Your mother cooked often?”

“When she had time. She worked too much.” I stirred the tomatoes into the garlic and watched the oil turn red around the edges. “Pasta e ceci was what she made when she came home tired but didn’t want to admit it. She would put music on and complain about people from work until the food was done.”

“What music?”

“Anything she could sing badly enough to annoy my grandfather.”

A faint smile touched his mouth. I added the chickpeas to the pot.

“The last things she bought before she died were toothpaste, Tylenol, and lemon cookies,” I murmured.

Sergei’s hands stilled over the bowl. I kept stirring because looking at him would make it harder to get the words out.

“They were in the grocery bag on the passenger seat when the police found her car. The toothpaste was for me because apparently squeezing the tube in the middle made me a criminal. The Tylenol was for Nonno’s knee.” My throat tightened around the rest. “The cookies were my favorites, the cheap powdered ones she pretended she bought for herself, but she always left most of them for me.”

Sergei stayed quiet.

“People talk about the big things after someone dies,” I continued. “The funeral. The police. The questions. Who called who and what should have happened differently. But I kept thinking about that bag.”

The wooden spoon scraped quietly across the bottom of the pot. Sergei washed his hands, dried them, and came to stand beside me. He didn’t touch me immediately. His shoulder rested close enough to mine that I could feel the energy of him through my sweater.