Chapter 4 Daisy
DAISY
Four months into year one.
"The backup generator should have kicked in," he says.
"Maybe it's broken."
"It's not broken. I had it serviced three weeks ago."
"And yet." I gesture at the darkness around us, broken only by the city lights filtering through the massive windows and the snow falling in thick curtains outside. "Here we are."
Adam frowns at his phone like he can restore its signal through sheer disapproval.
He's been in his home office since I woke up this morning, something about quarterly projections and a supplier dispute, and I'm fairly certain he hasn't eaten anything except the coffee I left outside his door at noon.
"There are candles in the hall closet," I say. "Third shelf, behind the emergency kit."
He looks at me. "You know where the candles are?"
"I live here."
"I didn't know we had candles."
"You also didn't know we had a wine rack until last month, and we've been married for four months." I push myself off the couch, navigating the dark living room with the confidence of someone who has spent her breaks from work exploring every inch of this place. "Sit down. I'll get them."
By the time I return with an armful of candles and a box of matches, Adam has given up on his phone and is standing at the window watching the snow fall. The city is a blur of white and soft light, traffic reduced to crawling headlights, the whole world gone quiet and strange.
"They're saying the storm will last through tomorrow," I say, setting candles on the coffee table. "I checked the weather before everything died."
"Tomorrow." He says it like I've told him the world is ending.
"It's just snow, Adam. People have survived it before."
"I have calls scheduled."
"Calls can be rescheduled." I strike a match, watching the small flame flicker to life.
"Here's what's going to happen: we're going to light some candles, I'm going to make us something to eat from whatever's in your extremely well-stocked refrigerator, and then we're going to sit here like normal humans and wait for the power to come back. "
"I don't—" He stops, looking genuinely lost. "What do normal humans do without electricity?"
I stare at him. Four months of marriage, and I'm still occasionally floored by how completely unprepared this man is for anything that can't be solved with money or technology.
"They talk," I say. "They play games. They read books."
"I don't have any fiction."
"You have books. I've been buying books." I light another candle, then another, until the living room glows warm and golden. "You just haven't noticed because they're in the reading room you built me, which you have never once entered."
His face tightens, not quite guilt but adjacent to it. "I didn't want to intrude."
"It's your penthouse."
"It's your room."
The gas stove can be lit manually. I dig through his refrigerator, which is impressively stocked for someone who never cooks. "You have pasta, garlic, olive oil, parmesan, and—" I squint at a container in the back. "Is this homemade marinara?"
"Luc makes it in batches."
"Of course he does." I pull out the ingredients, setting them on the counter. "Okay. We're having aglio e olio. Simple, fast, and I can make it by candlelight without burning your apartment down."
"Should I..." He gestures vaguely at the stove, the ingredients, the general concept of food preparation.
"Yes. You should." I hand him a knife and a cutting board. "Chop the garlic."
"I don't cook."
"You can chop. Chopping is not cooking. Chopping is destruction, and you're a CEO. Destroying things should be in your skill set."
He takes the knife with a look of profound skepticism. "How small?"
"Thin slices. Not minced, not crushed, sliced.
" I demonstrate with one clove, letting the knife rock through it in quick, even cuts.
"Like this. See how they're all the same thickness?
That's so they cook evenly. If some pieces are tiny and some are huge, the tiny ones burn while the huge ones stay raw. "
"That seems... unnecessarily precise for garlic."
"Everything in cooking is unnecessarily precise until you taste the difference. Then it's just precise." I hand him another clove. "Your turn."
He starts chopping. His technique is terrible (uneven pieces, too much force, the knife lifted too high between cuts) but he's trying.
His brow furrows in concentration, and his jaw tightens when a slice comes out wrong, and watching this massive, powerful man fumble through garlic prep makes my chest feel warm in a way I'm not ready to examine.
"You're holding the knife wrong," I say.
"I'm holding it with my hand. How else would I hold it?"
"Like this." I step closer, adjusting his grip around the handle. "Pinch grip. More control, less effort."
"This feels strange."
"Most correct things feel strange at first. Keep going."
He keeps going. The slices get marginally more even. Outside, the snow is falling harder now, the city muffled and white through the floor-to-ceiling windows.
"Where did you learn to cook?" Adam asks, not looking up from his garlic.
"My mother. She was—" I pause, measuring olive oil into a pan by instinct. "She was really good. Not professionally trained or anything, but she could make something out of nothing. Stretch a dollar into a feast. She taught me that food is love you can taste."
"Were you close?"
"Very. She died last spring." I say it matter-of-factly because I’m still practicing saying it, but the words still feel sharp in my throat. "She would have been horrified by your refrigerator, by the way. All these ingredients and nothing homemade. She'd call it a waste."
Adam is quiet for a moment. "I'm sorry. About your mother."
"Thank you." I take the cutting board from him, scraping his uneven garlic slices into the warming oil. "She would have been horrified by you too, probably. Rich guy with a penthouse who can't chop garlic. She had strong opinions about men who couldn't feed themselves."
"My father had strong opinions about men who could." Adam says it quietly, watching the garlic sizzle. "He considered cooking to be… beneath us. A distraction from more important work."
"More important than eating?"
"More important than anything that couldn't be monetized or leveraged." His voice is flat, careful. "Meals were for discussing business. Food was fuel. The kitchen was staff territory."
I stir the garlic, watching it turn golden, and try to imagine being raised that way.
Meals as meetings. Food as fuel. A whole childhood without a mother humming over a stove, without the smell of onions browning, without someone teaching you that a meal cooked with care means I love you even when the words are too hard.
"That's deeply sad," I say finally.
"It was efficient."
"Those aren't mutually exclusive." I add the pasta to the boiling water, setting a timer in my head. "You can be efficiently sad. Optimized misery. Maximum unhappiness with minimum wasted effort."
"You're mocking me."
"A little. But also I'm serious. Did anyone ever cook for you just because they wanted you to have something nice?"
Adam doesn't answer for a long moment. The candles flicker. The snow falls.
"My mother," he says finally. "I rarely stayed at the table long enough to notice."
The kitchen feels very quiet after that. I drain the pasta, toss it with the garlic oil and a handful of parmesan, add a little pasta water to make it glossy and coat properly. Adam watches me work like he's taking notes for a test.
"Come on," I say, handing him two bowls. "We're eating on the couch because your dining table is too far from the candles and I refuse to eat in the dark like some kind of Victorian ghost."
We settle on the couch, angled toward each other, knees almost touching. The candlelight makes everything soft, makes Adam's sharp features look almost gentle. He takes a bite of the pasta and his expression shifts.
"This is..." He pauses, searching for words. "Not terrible."
"High praise from a man who employs a private chef."
"Luc is excellent. But he doesn't make this."
"That's because Luc doesn't know how to make broke-college-student pasta.
It's a very specific skill set." I set my own plate aside, tucking my feet under me on the couch.
"My roommate freshman year taught me. She was from this tiny town in Maine, and her grandmother had recipes for making something out of nothing. "
"You had a roommate."
"Most people do, in college. We can't all have penthouse suites."
"I didn't have a penthouse suite." He says it quietly, like he's correcting a misconception. "I had a single room with a window that didn't close properly. My father believed in building character through discomfort."
"So no garlic and no insulated windows. Your father sounds like a delight."
Adam's mouth twitches, not quite a smile, but close. "He was effective."
"At making you miserable?"
"At making me successful."
"Again. Not mutually exclusive." I take my bowl back, twirling pasta onto my fork. "My mother used to say that anyone can teach you to survive, but it takes someone who loves you to teach you to live. Surviving isn't the same as living."
"Did she?"
"Did she what?"
"Teach you to live."
The question catches me off guard. I look at the candles, at the snow, at this strange evening in this strange penthouse with this strange man I married for reasons that made sense on paper and make less sense every day.
"She tried," I say finally. "She ran out of time, but she tried. I think about what she'd want for me and I try to do that instead of just... existing efficiently."
"What would she want for you?"
"Joy." The word comes out softer than I intended. "She'd want me to have joy. Real joy, not the kind you perform for other people. The kind that's just yours."
Adam is quiet for a long moment, his pasta forgotten in his hands. The candlelight flickers across his face, and I see it there, clear enough: hunger, but not for food.
"I don't think I know what that feels like," he says quietly. "Joy that's just mine."