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“She’s not worried about how I left…She’s worried about how we were when we were together?” He nodded.
Noelle did a golf clap. “You see? You listened. If you want to win her back, which you should not do because you are literally the worst person I’ve ever met and you’ll never be good enough for her, you should show her that you two together can be different. Give her evidence. Let time take time.”
“I’ve been in love with her for twenty years, Noelle.” Now he was absolutely whining. “I want my heart to stop feeling like it’s stabbed every time I’m in a room with her. How much time is time going to take?”
“Levi, my dude, she’s going to pierce your heart every day forever.”She patted him on the head. “I’ve got work to do. You might want to do some, too.”
“Wait,” he called after her. “Miriam says you might be able to help me with something.”
“Are you really asking me for a favor on my birthday?” she asked, half turning back to him.
He huffed out a laugh. “I…um…I have some anger, at Cass, that I’m trying to figure out how to deal with. Miri said you were the person to talk to about that.”
Noelle turned her whole self back, a fist on her hip, and studied him. “Yeah. Yeah, I guess I am. All right, some day that’s not my birthday, come find me and we’ll form the two-person Mad At Cass Carrigan Support Group. You bring the snacks.”
“I can do that,” Levi agreed. “You can read the emotionally manipulative napkin she left with Elijah to give me after her death.”
“She fucking didn’t,” Noelle said, shaking her head. “I should be surprised, but did you see the one she sent Miriam?”
That night, everyone gathered for dinner in the dining room. His risotto was correctly praised as excellent (he’d managed to screw it up onAustralia’s Next Star Chefand it had almost sent him home, so getting it right for his family was a small redemption). Everyone sang very loudly, including Kringle.
Miriam looked at Noelle with so much love shining on her face, her feelings could probably be seen from space. Aliens were going to make contact, and someone was going to explain to them they hadn’t intentionally been signaled—it had just been dopey lovesick sapphics.
The Rosenstein’s home office had sent a rainbow tie-dye cake with rainbow confetti in the frosting, and Levi felt more than a twinge of jealousy. They sure as hell had never sent him a birthday cake, even when he’d been dating Hannah. He knew Noelle was fundamentally an easier person to like than he was, but damn. His best friend, his parents, his siblings, his in-laws. His wife.
Everyone liked her better except his cat. It was dawning on him a little that proactively living his life as a fuck-you to everyone was incompatible with being liked back by people you genuinely liked.
This made him surly and snappish, and his dad had to kick him under the table and tell him to stop snarling at people. Being more pleasant to his loved ones was obviously going well.
Elijah and Jason came with their twins, Jayla and Jeremiah. They were overwhelmingly cute and reminded Levi of when Esther and Joshua had been little and he’d been intent on being a good big brother. When had he forgotten that vow to himself? Maybe he could be a good uncle to the Green twins. And, you know, his actual nephew if Joshua would let him. Jason gave him a hard time about when he was going to come over for dinner, and he was surprised the invitation had been genuine rather than a polite fiction, so he set a date for the next week.
Collin, of the better-than-average egg salad, came with his wife, Marisol, a boutique owner from Advent. According to his mom, who was his source for all Advent gossip, Marisol and Collin had danced around each other for years and finally gotten together at the Carrigan’s Christmas Eve tree lighting. They’d wasted no time getting married. Levi felt a certain affinity for them, having also jumped into marriage.
Marisol ribbed Noelle about getting her ass handed to her in Spite and Malice, and they had a rapid-fire conversation in Spanish mostly about how he was a shithead but Noelle was trying not to kill him.
“Lo apprecio,” he said, because it seemed shady to let them talk without cluing them in that he was, after several years in commercial kitchens, fluent in Spanish.
Noelle glared daggers at him. Marisol threw back her head and laughed. Levi liked her.
He also liked Ernie, the owner of the dive bar on Main Street, where trivia was now played. He’d adored her grandmother, after whom both she and the bar were named and had spent many hours sitting in a dark corner of the bar sulking.
Along with his high school English teacher, Mrs. Acosta, the original Ernie had been one of the adults who always checked on him. At the time, he’d been too much of a feral cat to appreciate their interference, but as he looked back on that time and tried to remember the good parts, he had a lot of memories of one or the other of them keeping an eye out for him.
The new Ernie, a stunning young Black woman with lipstick the red of dark summer cherries and box braids, asked him about behind-the-scenes secrets ofAustralia’s Next Star Chefand they gossiped about what the judges were actually like offscreen.
For several hours in a row, he wasn’t miserable at all.
He didn’t feel the way he did when he was traveling, like he could put on whatever persona felt right that day, but he didn’t feel the way he usually did at home. He didn’t feel stuck inside an ill-fitting Halloween costume, several years too small. He wasn’t obsessing about how everything he said came across. He was just there, and it wasn’t going terribly. He would never be at home without having to mask at all, because being at home meant all the old dynamics he’d grown out of, but for an hour or two he retracted his claws and stopped expecting everyone to hate him because of who he used to be.
Blue, Age 23
It’s my fucking birthday!” Levi yelled as he threw back a shot.
Laurence cheered, and their buddy Short Darren whooped from his place on the couch. They were celebrating in the shitty, cheap apartment Levi shared with four other recent CIA grads. The Culinary Institute of America might have prepared them to work in world-class kitchens, but there were thousands of talented young cooks in New York City, and even if you had a great mentorship, you couldn’t afford your own place. Or to drink in bars.
The landline rang, the handset buried somewhere in the couch cushions. Short Darren fished it out and answered, “Wooohoooo!”
“No one named Blue lives here, dude! Blue’s not even a name!” Short Darren dissolved into giggles while Levi grabbed the phone from him.
