“I’m not familiar with your Massachusetts slander. This is something East Coast folks need to work out among yourselves,” she explained, watching him struggle with her gas range. “To be fair, I only know, like, three states. I had this awful teacher in the fourth grade who sent me down to the office every time she caught me staring out the window, so I have these weird gaps in my foundational knowledge. I know almost nothing about the American Revolution.”
She also lacked confidence with an analog clock, but she wasn’t about to admit every weakness Mrs. Leary’s zero-tolerance policy for “woolgathering” had left behind.
He tilted his head to examine her from the other side of thekitchen. “Is the American Revolution a subject most people know a lot about?”
“Apparently. Bree took me and my gran to seeHamiltonon tour, and I couldn’t follow any of it. Just totally confused from minute one.”
“Don’t they rap everything that’s happening in painstaking detail?”
She huffed out a laugh. “Okay, I revealed something very vulnerable to you, and you have yet to tell me what state you grew up in.”
Air sputtered from his lips. “Fine. I grew up in New Jersey. Are you familiar?”
“New Jersey,” she repeated, as if that was the first she’d heard of it. “It’s pretty rich for you to be throwing stones at Massachusetts. But then again, my only source for your state culture is theReal Housewives. You know—” She tapped her chin. “That wasn’t the accent I thought I was detecting.”
Their conversation had fallen into an easy rhythm. It helped that he was busying himself in the kitchen and they weren’t staring each other down across the table. Maybe they’d never be friends, but she could handle this. She didn’t need to be friends with her husband.
Husband. The word sounded like a gong inside her skull every time she thought it.
“I don’t have an accent,” he argued, almost reflexively.
“Not all the time, but occasionally you do.”
“Well, you’re from here, and yesterday, I heard two people calling a drinking fountain a ‘bubbler’ so…”
“Lucky for you, I don’t talk about drinking fountains enough to get cute with them.” She inhaled the cinnamon oatmeal coming to a boil. “So that’s where you were living before this?”
He stirred. “Uh, no. I moved to New York City for undergrad. Squatters’ rights are a big thing in New York. You could take your grift on the road!”
“Hilarious,” she replied flatly.
“Then Boston for grad school.”
“The source of your Massachusetts villain origin story, I’m sure.”
“How do you take it?” He had grabbed the full carafe out of the coffee maker and poured it into the ceramic mugs taken from the hooks under the cabinet.
“About as much milk as coffee,” she instructed.
He nodded, tapping his temple like he was locking her coffee preference into his brain, then carried on with his train of thought. “Then I spent a little time in Japan studying abroad. Japanese architecture was a major influence on Groff—”
“Who you’re in love with.” She accepted the mug of milky coffee, exactly as she liked it.
“—who was the focus of my dissertation,” he grumbled. “Then I did a fellowship in Munich and most recently lived in DC.”
“Where you work for the feds,” she finished.
He poured the oatmeal into two bowls and set one in front of her. “Are you trying to get to know me or something?” he asked, his voice smug.
“Wouldn’t dream of it.” She rolled her eyes. “You’ve justbeenplaces.” Something curled in her chest at the mere notion of going anywhere, when she’d been nowhere. His world suddenly seemed bigger than hers.
“Where have you been?” he asked, clearly not realizing just how loaded a question like that was for her.
“Once you buy my house, I’m going to France,” she declared.She hadn’t even realized she’d decided it, but it felt good to state her intentions definitively. To give a dream oxygen and sunlight like it was a living, breathing thing she could nurture and grow.
“Why France?” he asked, but before she was forced to answer, a shriek cracked between them.
“ELAINE COLETTE DAVIS!” Bree’s voice carried in on a gust through the open window, pulling them both out of their shockingly cozy rhythm.
