Chapter 2
Three days later I moved into a penthouse on the forty-first floor overlooking Lake Michigan, into a guest room the size of my entire apartment, and I stood at the window for a long time with my duffel bag still in my hand, watching the lake do what it does.
I had rules. I had written them on the contract in my own handwriting before I signed, because I did not trust a document I had not touched.
*My job comes first.*
*No controlling what I wear.*
*No lying to me.*
*No dragging me into your criminal mysteries.*
*Separate bedrooms.*
He had read them all without expression and said *done* to each one, and paused half a second on the last, and then said *done* to that too.
I did not know yet that the pause was the most honest thing that had happened in that kitchen.
Elena Marino arrived that evening.
She came through the door of the penthouse at six o’clock on the arm of a nurse, and she was smaller than I expected and much harder to look at than I expected, in the way that very old women who have never once in their lives been foolish are hard to look at. Pearls. Gray hair set with a comb. A cane she did not appear to need. Eyes that went over me top to bottom in one motion and filed everything they found.
She hugged me. She was surprisingly strong.
Then she took my face in both hands and held it, and looked at me for a long time.
“You love him?” she asked.
Behind me, Luke’s fingers closed around mine.
I have thought about that moment more than any other moment of those three months. He did it fast, and his hand was warm, and I understood in the space of one breath that he was not doing it for her. He was doing it because he did not know what I would say, and he wanted something to hold onto while I said it.
“Yes,” I said.
Elena smiled.
Her eyes did not.
“Then you’ll know what he fears,” she said.
Luke’s grip tightened, hard enough that I felt the bones of my hand move.
Dinner was lasagna, and it was an interrogation wearing lasagna as a disguise.
Where did we meet. The kitchen, I said, which was true. Who kissed whom first. Him, Luke said, and Elena’s eyebrow went up a millimeter. What does he order when he’s stressed. I looked at Luke, who looked at his plate. Soup, I said, guessing. He squeezed my knee under the table. I had guessed right.
Then Elena set down her fork.
“What does he do,” she asked, “when he cannot sleep?”
The room stopped.
Luke went absolutely still beside me — not tense, still, the way a man goes when he has been caught somewhere he did not expect to be seen.
And I knew the answer, because I had seen it three days ago in a kitchen at five in the morning, and because I had spent my entire adult life learning to read people by what their hands do.
“He cooks,” I said.
Elena’s fork stopped halfway to her mouth.
Luke turned his head and stared at me. Not with anger. With something much worse — with the expression of a man watching a door open in a wall he had spent twenty years believing was solid.
“How did you know?” he asked me later, in the hallway, after Elena had been helped to her car.
“You knew how to hold a piping bag,” I said.
He looked at me.
“Nobody knows how to hold a piping bag,” I said. “People who’ve never cooked hold it like a hammer. You held it like a pencil and you corrected from your fingers. That’s not something you learn at forty. That’s something you learn at twelve, in a kitchen, from someone who made you do it a hundred times.”
He did not say anything.
“You cook when you can’t sleep,” I said. “You’ve done it since you were a kid. It’s the only thing that ever calmed you down. And your grandmother knows it, and the fact that she asked that question in front of me means she was testing something, and you know it.”
Luke was quiet for a long moment.
“Yes,” he said.
“What was she testing?”
But before he could answer, Mark came down the hall at a pace that did not belong in a penthouse at ten o’clock at night, and handed Luke a phone.
Luke read the screen.
He read it for a long time. Longer than the message could possibly have been.
Then he looked up at me, and for the first time since I had met him — through the suit and the cupcakes and the four minutes and the contract — Luke Marino looked afraid.
“The building you’re trying to lease,” he said quietly. “On Damen.”
My stomach dropped through the floor.
“Was bought this morning.”
“By whom?”
He turned the phone around.
The buyer was Marino Holdings.
“You bought my bakery?” My voice came out flat and strange. “You bought my—”
“No.”
“Then who?”
May you like
Luke looked at me, and I watched a man who had never in his life needed to explain himself try to find the words for something he had clearly been carrying for a very long time.
“My father did.”
