Page 26 of The Wife He Replaced
From Carl, on a Thursday, while Madeleine was plating his lunch: "Hey, Chef. Your man was here yesterday. He's getting better. Still can't dice worth a damn, but he's getting better."
She didn't respond to any of it. She didn't call Drew. She didn't drive to the penthouse. She went back to Paige's farmhouse every night and sat at the kitchen table and worked on the breakfast service proposal. The proposal became the thing that held her together the way the letter had almost taken her apart.
The weekend breakfast program. She'd written the first version months ago — a detailed plan for expanding Broad Street Kitchen's hours to include Saturday and Sunday mornings, targeting families in transitional housing who had nowhere to go on weekends when the weekday services shut down. She'd costed out the staffing, the food budget, the equipment upgrades. She'd designed a menu that a rotating crew of volunteers could execute without a professional chef on-site: frittatas, oatmeal stations, pancakes made from a batter she'd pre-mix herself and freeze in portions, biscuits from a recipe so simple she could teach it in fifteen minutes. She'd brought the proposal to Drew on a Sunday evening, printed and bound, and he'd saidthat's great, babewithout reading past the cover page and gone back to his laptop.
She was building it now. The program itself. She'd called the director of Broad Street's parent nonprofit and pitched it over the phone. The director had said yes before Madeleine had finished her second sentence because the need was obvious to anyone who was paying attention. The budget was tight. The staffing was uncertain. The kitchen needed a new griddle and the existing oven couldn't handle the volume. Madeleine solved each problem the way she'd always solved problems: with care, with the understanding that feeding people was not a hobby or a vanity project but a vocation.
She spent evenings at Paige's kitchen table sketching layouts for the new service stations. She tested recipes on Paige's oven — the frittata needed more eggs, the pancake batter was too thick, the biscuit recipe worked perfectly on the first try because some things, when you'd practiced them long enough, came out right without effort. Paige tasted everything and gave feedback with the blunt honesty of a chef who loved Madeleine too much to lie, and the collaboration reminded Madeleine of culinary school, of the years before Drew, of the woman she'd been when her identity was not Mrs. Adler.
She finished the proposal and printed it on Paige's printer. She put it in a folder, a document that proved she could build something without permission, without partnership, without a man at the head of the table telling her it looked great.
Madeleine went to bed. But despite everything that was going well, going better, the ache in her heart for her husband remained.
CHAPTER 15
DREW
The chicken was goingto be dry.
Drew knew it was going to be dry because he'd already overcooked two practice chickens earlier that week: one so badly that it could have been used as a doorstop, and the other passable but leathery in the breast, which he'd eaten standing at the counter with his hands because he couldn't find the carving knife. The carving knife was part of the set Madeleine kept in her knife roll, which was at Paige's farmhouse, which was where Madeleine was, which was the whole problem.
This was his third attempt. He'd watched four YouTube videos, read the recipe in Madeleine's cookbook twice, and called Delia at Broad Street Kitchen to ask about oven temperatures, a conversation during which Delia had laughed so hard she'd had to put the phone down.
"You're roasting a chicken, not performing surgery," she'd said. "Four hundred degrees. Season it the night before. Don't open the oven every five minutes to check on it. It's a chicken, not a child."
He'd seasoned it the night before. Salt, pepper, thyme, a lemon he'd shoved inside the cavity. He'd rubbed the skin with butter — too much butter, probably, his hands were coated —and set it in the roasting pan Madeleine kept on the bottom shelf of the cabinet. It was the heavy enameled one she'd bought in France years ago, before they'd met, when she was still in culinary school and spending a summer staging at a restaurant in Lyon. She'd told him that story once, early in their marriage: how she'd found the pan at a flea market in the Croix-Rousse district and carried it through six countries in a backpack because it weighed eight pounds but she loved it. He'd said "that's commitment" and she'd said "that's cooking" and he hadn't understood the difference. He was beginning to.
The text he'd sent her that morning was the most terrifying thing he'd ever written, and he'd once stared down a hostile board vote:
I'm cooking dinner tonight. At the penthouse. I have no idea if it will be edible. Would you come?
She hadn't responded for two hours. Then:
What are you making?
Roast chicken. Or what I hope will be roast chicken. There's a reasonable chance it's charcoal.
Another hour. Then:
What time?
Seven.
Okay.
One word. Four letters. Drew had stared at it for a full minute, his heart hammering, and then he'd put his phone in his desk drawer and gone back to work. He accomplished nothing for the rest of the afternoon because his brain was running a continuous loop ofshe said okay, she said okay, she's coming, don't burn the chicken.
Now it was six-forty-five. The chicken was in the oven, the penthouse smelled like roasting meat and herbs and he was standing at the island in jeans and a button-down with his sleeves rolled up, looking at the table he'd set. Two places, noteight, no candles because candles seemed presumptuous, cloth napkins because Madeleine cared about cloth napkins — and wondering whether this was the most important meal of his life or the most delusional.
He'd also made a salad. The salad was bad. He'd bought the wrong lettuce — iceberg, which he'd since learned from YouTube was apparently the least respected lettuce in the culinary world. The dressing was oil and vinegar in proportions that tasted like salad-flavored acid. He threw it out and started over with arugula and a simpler dressing: olive oil, lemon juice, salt. He tasted it. It was fine. Not good. Fine.
He was arranging the arugula on plates when the door opened.
Madeleine stood in the foyer. She was wearing jeans and a sweater. Her hair was pulled back, she had no makeup on and she was the most beautiful thing he'd ever seen. But he was not going to say that because saying it right now would sound like a line, and lines were what had gotten him here.
"Hi," he said.
"Hi." She came into the kitchen. She looked at the table, the two settings, the absence of candles. She looked at the stove, the oven, the roasting pan visible through the glass door. She looked at him, standing there with a dish towel over his shoulder like a man playing dress-up in someone else's life, and the ghost of a smile appeared.
