Chapter 6
TESSA
The Strand bookstore had been Tessa’s research sanctuary since culinary school.
Miles of books, the famous sign proclaimed. Most people came for the fiction bestsellers or the discount carts outside. Tessa came for the cookbooks tucked into the third-floor alcove where natural light filtered through tall windows and tourists rarely ventured.
Tuesday afternoon meant the store was quieter than on weekends. A few NYU students camped in the literature section with highlighters in hand. Someone flipped through art books near the windows. The hum of people moving through stacks was the soundtrack of her favorite hours.
Tessa climbed the narrow stairs to the third floor. She had two hours before her evening client call, enough time to hunt for vintage cookbooks that might yield inspiration for upcoming fall menus.
The cookbook section occupied a corner near the back. Floor-to-ceiling shelves were crammed with spines in every state of preservation. The books smelled like paper and old leather.
She pulled down a 1962 volume called The Gracious Hostess.
It assumed you had servants and a cigarette holder.
She turned the pages slowly. Crown roasts.
Molded salads. A diagram showing how to fold napkins into swans.
Her grandmother had owned a copy of this, and in the margin of the lasagna recipe Nana had marked through the canned-tomato instruction in red pen: NEVER.
Use San Marzano. Some of Nana’s best advice had lived in the margins of other people’s books.
Tessa was smiling at the lasagna page when her phone buzzed.
Lucy: Where are you.
Tessa: The Strand.
Lucy: Stop hiding at The Strand and text me back about Thursday’s dessert order.
Tessa: I’m not hiding. I’m researching.
Lucy: You’ve been researching since last week. You showed up Monday for ten minutes and vanished.
Tessa: I’ve been busy.
Lucy: You’re avoiding me because you don’t want to talk about Gabriel Sterling.
Tessa pocketed her phone. Lucy was right.
“That one’s a classic.”
Tessa went still, fingers tightening on the cookbook spine.
No way.
She turned.
Gabriel Sterling stood three feet away, holding a hardcover business book, staring at her like she had materialized from thin air.
The aisle was narrow. Too narrow. Shelves pressed in from both sides.
She could see the precise instant recognition tipped into laughter.
It started in his eyes, spread to his mouth, and then he was laughing, shoulders shaking.
Tessa’s control cracked. The laugh escaped before she could stop it.
They stood in the cookbook section of The Strand on a Tuesday afternoon and laughed like people who had given up on sanity.
“Okay,” Tessa managed when she could breathe again. “What’s happening?”
“I have no idea.”
“The wedding was inevitable. Your friends. My work. They were bound to overlap, eventually.”
“Agreed.”
“The meeting. Professional.”
“Yes.”
“The coffee shop. The bakery. All explainable.”
“Right.”
“But this.” She gestured around them. “A bookstore. In a city of eight million people.”
“Statistically improbable.”
“Beyond improbable. We’re talking lottery-winning, lightning-striking levels of impossible.”
Gabriel’s mouth curved. “Do you come here often?”
“Tuesdays. When I need cookbook inspiration. You?”
“Once a month. Business section. Usually Fridays.”
“So you’re here on a Tuesday because?”
“My meeting got canceled. I thought I’d use the time productively.”
He stepped closer to read the spine of the cookbook in her hand, and his shoulder brushed hers. They both went still. His breath caught in the inch of air between them, and neither of them moved.
“It’s research,” she said. Her voice came out rough. “Most of it won’t make the final menu.”
“But some of it will.”
“If I’m lucky.”
She should step back and create space. Stop standing in a narrow aisle pressed against Gabriel Sterling like she was seventeen and hiding between the stacks at Ashford’s library. She didn’t move.
Neither did he.
“I should keep looking,” Tessa said.
“Yes.” He still didn’t move.
She tipped her face up to his. His eyes were already there, and they dropped to her mouth and stayed there long enough for her stomach to drop. Gabriel Sterling was looking at her the way he used to, and every cell in her body remembered.
She made herself step sideways. Cold rushed into the inch where his shoulder had been, and the absence felt like a small grief.
Gabriel pulled in a breath. “This is—”
“Don’t say it.”
“I was going to say complicated.”
“That’s worse.”
His mouth twitched. “Fair.”
“Do you want to get coffee?”
She should say no. She should maintain a professional distance. “Yes.”
They walked down the narrow stairs together, paid for their books at separate registers, and met outside on Broadway.
They found a small coffee shop with three tables near the window and sat across from each other with their cups between them. The table was so small their knees bumped underneath. Tessa pulled back. Gabriel did, too. There was nowhere to go.
“Talk to me about your business,” he said.
“Which part?”
“Any part. The hard part. The funny part. I want to know how you built it.”
She wrapped her hands around her cup. “I started with a used food truck and a notebook full of standing orders from the women on my culinary school’s block in the city.
But before that, I was nineteen, my mom was in the hospital, and I could either keep crying about insurance or sell cookies door to door.
Crying wasn’t paying the bills. So I sold cookies. ”
“How many cookies?”
“On the worst day, eighty-four. On the best day, three hundred and forty-two. I priced them at two dollars each, and I learned in the first week that people pay more for a brown paper bag and a handwritten label than they pay for a box. Presentation is half the meal. My grandmother told me that, and I didn’t believe her until I had two regular accounts and a notebook of standing orders by the time my mother came home. ”
“From cookies to a warehouse.”
“From cookies to a food truck. From a food truck to a kitchen I rented an hour at a time on Wednesdays from a community center in Brooklyn. From the community center to my own space. The woman who ran the kitchen was Esther, and she told me on my last Wednesday there that I had been the only renter who left her kitchen cleaner than I found it, and she expected me to remember that when I had my own people. So I do.”
Gabriel had set his coffee down. He was watching her the way he used to watch her in calculus when she was working through a proof at the board. Like he was waiting to see what she did next, and like he already knew.
“What about you?” she asked.
“Less interesting.”
“I doubt that. Ronan was your roommate. Knox was your, what?”
“My TA. Sophomore year. Then my project partner junior year. Then my problem child every year after that.”
“Why finance?”
“Because it’s exactly what my father didn’t want.
He assumed I’d take over the firm in his name and do what I was told.
I went the opposite direction. If I was going to run something, I wanted to build it.
” He paused. “Knox and Ronan wanted to bet on me, and at twenty-four I’d have walked off a roof if those two had told me to. ”
“That tracks.”
“Less tracking. More foundation.”
She laughed. He smiled, and the smile loosened something behind her ribs that had been wound tight since the wedding.
“Your grandmother,” he said. “Tell me about her.”
“Nana Rose. She made me walk six blocks in the snow on Christmas Eve when I was nine because the only store with fresh tomatoes had run out and the closer store only had canned. She said if I wanted to learn to cook I needed to learn the difference. My feet were soaked. She made me hot chocolate when we got home and let me stir the sauce. That was the day I learned what mattered.”
“What happened to her?”
“Heart attack. Seven years ago. She made dinner Tuesday, called my mother Wednesday morning to complain about a salesman, and was gone by Wednesday night. The way she would have wanted. No fuss.”
“I would have liked to meet her.”
“She would have hated you.”
“Why?”
“Because you went to Harvard and your mother made me cry in a hallway when I was seventeen. Nana would have stayed mad about both for the rest of her life.”
He winced. “Fair.”
“It’s not your fault.”
“Some of it was.”
“Probably.”
She took a sip of her coffee. He took a sip of his. The bell over the door chimed, a man came in, and the café went on existing without them.
“Thursday morning,” he said. “Still on?”
“I’ll be there.”
He stood and picked up his coffee. He looked down at her with an expression she couldn’t quite read.
“See you Thursday, Tessa.”
He left. The bell chimed, and she watched him disappear into the river of commuters.
Her phone buzzed.
Lucy: WHAT’S UP BUTTERCUP.
Tessa: Ran into Gabriel. Again.
Lucy: WHERE.
Tessa: The Strand. We got coffee.
Lucy: WHAT IS HAPPENING.
Tessa: I don’t know.
Thursday morning.
Tessa changed her outfit three times. The first was too casual, jeans and a sweater that said I didn’t think about this at all.
The second was too much, a dress that screamed I have been thinking about this since Tuesday.
She settled on something in between. Dark pants.
A cream blouse. Professional enough to pretend she had meetings after, casual enough to suggest she hadn’t agonized over it. She had.
The coffee shop was five blocks from her apartment.
She arrived fifteen minutes early, claimed a table by the window, and immediately reorganized everything on it.
Napkin on the left. No, the right. Sugar packets in a neat row.
Her phone face-down so she wouldn’t check it.
Face-up so she could see when he texted.
Face-down again. She was being ridiculous.
Gabriel walked in at exactly eight o’clock. He saw her immediately, and the look on his face stopped her hands mid-fidget.
“You’re early,” he said, sliding into the seat across from her.