Page 30 of The Wife He Replaced
He didn't flinch. He didn't apologize. He just said, "Tell me about the breakfast program."
So she did. She told him about the weekend gap — how the weekday services shut down Friday afternoon and didn't restart until Monday, and for families in transitional housing that meant two days of nothing. She told him about the menu she'd designed: frittatas, oatmeal stations, pancakes from a batter she'd pre-mix and freeze in portions, biscuits from a recipe simple enough to teach a first-time volunteer in fifteen minutes. She told him about the budget, the staffing gaps, the oven that couldn't handle the volume.
She talked for ten minutes. Drew didn't interrupt. He didn't saythat's great, babe. He asked questions — real questions, the kind that showed he was tracking the details. How many families? What's the per-plate cost? Who trains the volunteers? When she described the biscuit recipe she'd tested at Paige's, how she'd gotten it down to five ingredients and twelve minutes from mixing bowl to oven, his eyebrows went up.
"Five ingredients."
"Flour, butter, buttermilk, baking powder, salt. That's it. If you can stir, you can make them."
"I can barely stir."
"I've seen your stirring. It's adequate."
The corner of his mouth twitched. She felt something move behind her ribs — a loosening, small and involuntary, the way a muscle unclenches after you've been bracing against a cold wind and the wind drops.
They cleaned the kitchen together. Drew mopped without being asked. Madeleine wiped down the prep tables, restocked the dry goods, checked the walk-in temps. When they were done, she untied her apron and hung it on the hook by the back door and stood there, unsure of the next step the way she hadn't been unsure in this kitchen in years.
"Walk with me?" Drew said.
She looked at him. He had his coat on. His hands were in his pockets. He wasn't leaning toward her or reaching for her or angling his body with the anticipatory certainty she remembered from the old Drew, the one who moved through the world expecting every room to rearrange itself around him. He was just standing by the door, asking.
"Okay," she said.
They walked. Broad Street in the late afternoon, the sidewalks cracked and uneven, the cold air carrying the smell of exhaust and roasted peanuts from the cart on the corner. They passed the check-cashing place, the laundromat with the hand-lettered sign, the barbershop where the old men sat in the window and watched the street like a channel they never changed. Drew matched her pace. He didn't steer. He walked beside her and they didn't touch. The not-touching was its own kind of conversation, two people occupying the same space without colliding, leaving room.
"The biscuit recipe," he said. "Would you teach me?"
"You want to learn to make biscuits?”
"I want to learn to make biscuits that can be taught to volunteers. Seems like a useful skill."
She glanced at him. The late light caught the angles of his face, the jaw she knew by heart, the dark hair ruffled from the kitchen's heat. He was looking straight ahead, watching the street, giving her space to study him without being studied back.
"Come to the penthouse Friday," he said. "I'll cook. I'm getting better — Delia said my dicing is almost passable, which from Delia is practically the Medal of Honor."
"What are you making?"
"I don't know yet. Something with squash, probably. I've been practicing squash." He paused. "I bought a lot of squash."
"I heard."
He looked at her then. "You heard?"
"Gina saw you at Reading Terminal. She said you were reading a recipe on your phone and looked lost."
A flush crept up his neck. Drew Adler, blushing. She couldn't remember the last time she'd seen him blush. The boardroom confidence, the pitch-deck poise — gone. Replaced by a man who'd been caught buying too much squash at a public market and didn't have a cover story.
"I was lost," he said. "There are a lot of squash varieties. I didn't know that. Did you know there's a squash called a delicata?"
"I know what a delicata is," she said, grinning.
"It's good. It's my favorite so far. You can eat the skin."
He smiled, which transformed his already handsome face into an even more handsome one. A flutter, light and fast, was happening in her chest. The wingbeat of something she hadn't felt in so long she'd forgotten what it was called. Butterflies. She was standing on a cracked sidewalk on North Broad Street next to her husband, who'd just told her his favorite squash, and she had butterflies.
"Friday," she said. "Seven o'clock."
"Seven o'clock."
