A serious one.
Winnie worked for me. She spent more waking hours with my children than anyone else. If I crossed that line and everything fell apart, I wouldn’t just lose whatever this strange thing was between us, the kids would lose her too. I’d spent months trying to rebuild some sense of stability for them. The last thing they needed was another adult disappearing from their lives because I couldn’t get my feelings under control.
“You’re chopping emotionally again,” Winnie said after I’d been lost in my thoughts for God knew how long.
I cleared my throat, trying to save face. “What does that even mean?”
“It means these potatoes look like you had a personal vendetta against them. You’ve made potato mush.”
“I prefer aggressive food preparation.”
“I can tell.”
At one point, I managed to get flour on my shirt. At another, Winnie laughed so hard at my attempt to flip vegetables in a pan that she had to brace one hand against the counter.
“You said wrist flick!”
She wiped a tear from her eye. “I did not say launch them into orbit.”
A mushroom hit the floor. We stared at it, then at each other, and simultaneously burst into laughter.
There were no children or work calls to interrupt us. Just warmth and food and sunlight slipping gradually toward evening.
Every minute together was increasingly tantalizing. Attraction was one thing. I could handle attraction. Attraction was simple. This?—
This was bigger. Intimate in all the ways that mattered most.
She held a spoon to my lips. “Taste.”
I obeyed automatically. The sauce was incredible with rich tomato, garlic, wine, and something herbal underneath I couldn’t identify.
“Oh my god,” I moaned.
Winnie flashed me a smug smile. “Good?”
“I might cry.”
“That would be dramatic.”
“I’m serious, Winnie.” I took another bite. “This is unbelievable.”
“You had a hand in it. You added the garlic, remember?”
Before I could stop myself, I said, “You seem happy.”
Winnie stilled, dropping her gaze to the simmering sauce.
“I am,” she admitted.
She looked beautiful like this. There was nothing glamorous about her like there had been that night at the speakeasy, but she was real, standing in front of me, breathing the same air. I could barely contain the instinct to pull her close.
Her hair curled around her face from the steam drifting up from the pan, and her cheeks were pinker than usual.
Homey. The thought hit me so hard, I had to look away. I could picture this life too easily. Too naturally. Coming downstairs to her. Cooking together. The children running through the house around us. It terrified me how much I wanted it.
Wanting it didn’t mean I’d stopped loving Jade. I never would. I still missed her in quiet moments that caught me off guard. Sometimes it was a song in the grocery store. Sometimesit happened when I was reaching for my phone to tell her something funny before I remembered there wasn’t anyone waiting on the other end anymore. There wasn’t a version of my life where she stopped mattering.
But sometime over the past weeks, the constant heaviness inside me had eased enough to allow something else to slip in next to it. Not in place of it but sharing its space. Hope, maybe. Or simply the certainty that life wasn’t done giving good things to me. I hadn’t felt that since the day I buried my wife. And now, standing in my kitchen with Winnie, I realized how desperately I’d missed it.
