Chapter Ten
Edie jumped when the kitchen door of the inn banged open.
“It’s not what it looks like!” she shouted in her panic that it would be Morag, while throwing a tea towel over a bowl of flour and the plant butter she’d just cubed.
“It looks like you’re baking.” Cosima shut the door behind her.
Edie pressed her hands against her chest. “Jesus HC in a bike basket, you don’t knock?”
“On the kitchen door? Where’s Morag?”
“She’s in Grantham picking up the linens from the laundry, but she said she’d be late because she has dinner with the East Midlands Tourist Board.
If that is a real organization. But she said ‘late.’ What time is late to an eighty-six-year-old?
What time is it now?” Edie pulled the tea towel off the bowl and scooped up the cubes of butter.
She dumped them into the sifted flour and started cutting the butter in with her fingers double-time.
“Ignore what I’m doing. You saw nothing. ”
“It’s eight.” Cosima pulled off her jacket and put it on a chair by the pantry.
Her linen shirt and trousers had dried into a web of wrinkles, the muddy hems of her pants were stuffed into even more muddy boots, and her hair had frizzed magnificently around her head.
She looked beautiful. And disconcertingly soft-eyed.
Edie concentrated on rolling pea-sized crumbs off her fingertips. The humiliation and frustration of their argument hadn’t faded. “Eight feels late. I should’ve started earlier, but I had to nerve myself up.”
“To do what?”
“Shortbread.” Edie made finer and finer crumbs gravel through her fingers, realizing that her decision to mix up shortbread had been a bad mistake.
She made amazing, award-winning shortbread, but also, she had made shortbread every day for Fauxmage.
Taking her body through the motions of this task had quickly turned into genuine psychological torture that she’d only identified when Cosima burst into the kitchen.
She felt dreadful, like a creature that dwelled at the bottom of a well.
Cosima sat down at the work table, folding her hands. “And you’re making shortbread because?”
“Because I wanted to make shortbread. If you’re going to sit there when it’s getting late enough that I’m going to be caught and then thrown out and have to sleep in the greenhouse, then you could make yourself useful and zest that lemon.”
Cosima surveyed the work table. “This lemon?”
“Any lemon.” Edie blew out a breath. “But yes, that one, because I washed it.”
“I don’t know how to do what you’re asking.”
The admission somewhat deflated Edie’s effort to keep this conversation brisk and far, far away from her feelings. She took her hands out of the bowl and pushed the Microplane grater across the space between them. “I’m asking you to zest.”
Cosima picked up the plane, the tool in one hand, lemon in the other. “And zesting is?”
Edie sighed—sighed out all of the air in her lungs—and brushed off her hands into the bowl.
She walked around the football-pitch-sized table and arrived at Cosima’s side, where she took the lemon and the grater from her, then stroked the lemon a few times over the plane, making a teaspoon’s worth of fluffy zest fall onto the table.
“Removing the zest. Just the yellow part, none of the pith, the white part. Move the lemon around and go in one direction.”
“Thank you.” Cosima held out her hands for the plane and the lemon. When Edie gave them to her, she made an experimental stroke with the lemon. “Oh! Look at that!” She pointed at the twenty-five flakes of zest she’d made.
“Well-done, chef.”
Edie returned to her station. She dripped coconut milk into her mixture and started folding it with her hands, and when it was three or four folds from being ready, she glanced across the table at Cosima. “I’m ready for your zest.”
Cosima held up a tea saucer with a perfect pyramid of yellow flakes. She stood up on the rungs of her stool and bent over the table, holding out the saucer until Edie could grasp it. Which she did, for a moment—before it slipped through her buttery fingers to break on the edge of the bowl.
Saucer shards rained down into her shortbread dough, ruining it.
“Very seriously fuck this in so many different directions.” She put her head down on her arms on the work table and smelled lemon zest and butter, a sensory reminder of a full year of hope and failure.
“Sit down,” Cosima said. “Give yourself a moment.”
“No. I have to hide the evidence.”
“Just let me,” Cosima said. “Morag won’t suspect a thing. Essentially all I did for my mother was clean up messes.”
It was a comment that struck Edie as not entirely aligned with how Cosima had spoken of her life before. What kind of messes had she been cleaning up?
She watched Cosima roll up her sleeves and pick up the pieces of the saucer to make a stack. She found a bench scraper next to the bowl. “I’ve seen chefs during events use these to clean the area?”
“Go for it.”
Cosima scraped the counter, then pulled a paper grocery bag from the recycling to dump crumbs and zest into.
She wiped down the coconut milk carton and wrung out a rag over and over with hot water to clean the table until there was nothing left but a folded-up bag of Edie’s crimes and clean dishes on the draining board.
“What is it that you do?” Edie accepted the glass of Ribena that Cosima poured for her. “And forgive me if it’s rude to presume you do anything.”
Cosima dried the bowl and nested it with others on a shelf. “I’m the acting board chair for Phoebe Frank Studios.”
“What does the board chair do?”
“I make a decision about anything that anyone thinks my mother would have had an opinion on. Before, I didn’t have an official title, I just did whatever she didn’t want to, and kept people from doing things that she wouldn’t like or that would make her upset.”
Cosima folded the tea towel in a perfect square and put it on the table before pouring her own glass of juice. Her voice had gone flat.
What Cosima had just described—that wasn’t a job description. That was a mess, probably toxic, definitely treacherous. Somewhere in what Cosima was saying and not saying, Edie guessed, was the secret she’d gotten angry with Morag about. Edie wasn’t sure she wanted to know what it was.
That was a lie. She wanted to know desperately.
“So do you like being a board chair? What do you go to college for to do that?”
Cosima’s smile was distantly polite. “At Bennington, we developed our own course of study. My degree was a kind of blend of taxonomy with art history.”
“That doesn’t sound like a straight path to sitting around a conference table.”
“The straight path to my job was being born Cosima Frank.”
Edie accepted the smackdown. Should’ve expected it.
Her muscles felt shaky. She’d taken a shower when she got back to the inn, soaked through with cold rain, and after she was dry and comfortable and her stomach was full with Morag’s genuinely incredible take on pasta ca’ muddica, she’d refused to answer Morag’s questions until Morag had to leave, and then she’d paced between the dining room, where the guest book still was, and the kitchen, until she was thinking too much about everything that had happened and she started making shortbread.
She had wanted, by the next time Cosima saw her, to have repaired the tumble in her brain enough to smooth over her meltdown at the church and then joke her way out of the treasure hunt, out of spending any more time together, out of everything but endless walks in the English countryside and meals Edie had decided she would start taking in her room.
Her heart hurt. She kept thinking of the map, wishing she really had been able to freeze time, to drag out that moment when they’d found it for longer, standing next to Cosima, teasing and laughing, elated.
“I suppose I’m not someone who could possibly understand what it is you’re responsible for,” she said.
Cosima shook her head, her golden-ratio eyebrows furrowed in gentle concern that made Edie’s heart feel too tender. “Edie, listen—”
“It’s okay, truly.”
“No. You were disappointed,” Cosima said. “By finding the map.”
“I was disappointed I couldn’t go to any of the places on the map.”
Cosima was studying Edie with the same frown between her eyebrows that she’d had bent over her notebook, working through the cipher. “And you know I could pay your way, and would be glad to, but you wouldn’t ask me to because…”
“I not only wouldn’t ask, if you offered I wouldn’t accept. A jacket is one thing—it was a kind of inside joke between us. I had already bought you a hedgehog pencil set, for example, at the tourist center’s gift shop.”
“You had?”
“Yes. But a European vacation is not a pencil set.”
“I once spent thirty-one thousand dollars on an Hermès Birkin bag because I spilled olive oil on my purse when I was in Dubai with my mother.”
“Jesus HC rises again, Cosima! Don’t tell me things like that. I’ll re-Catholic and take vows of poverty in defense against my shock.”
But Edie laughed, for the first time in hours.
Cosima laughed, too, and then—probably because of the lack of calories and sore heart and possibly because Cosima was so fucking pretty it was starting to burn Edie’s eyes—they were laughing together, but not at anything, really.
They were just laughing like children who’d needed to go to bed hours ago.
“Let me send you.” Morag’s voice made both Cosima and Edie scream.
“Why do you do that, woman?” Edie gasped. “Do I need to put up mirrors so I can see in all directions at the same time? Would I even see you in the mirrors if I did?”
Morag ignored Edie’s questions. She’d pinned her braids up, and she wore a plain wool peacoat with a hammered silver stag’s head brooch on the lapel.
“First of all, stay out of my kitchen. This is your last warning. Second, I’m aware you don’t want to let Cosima pay your way.
To be clear, I would let her. She wouldn’t miss it. ”