Chapter 15
Christopher
I was developing a problem.
The problem had flour on her collar and hummed while she cooked. The problem left covered plates in the refrigerator every night with sticky notes, once, just a small drawing of an angry face with its arms crossed.
The problem was five-foot-six with hazel eyes, auburn hair, and a smile that had a slight overlap on the left canine that she tried to hide when she laughed, pressing her lips together fast like she could catch it before anyone noticed.
I’d noticed. I noticed it the first time it happened, at the farmers market when I smelled the peach and she laughed so hard she had to cover it with a cough, and the tooth showed, and she covered her mouth, and I thought: don’t do that. Don’t hide that.
I didn’t say it. I kept it the way I kept everything about Miley Torres. At a distance. Under information gathered rather than feelings experienced.
I was lying to myself and I knew it.
But before I could deal with the problem of Miley Torres, I had another call to make.
My grandmother answered on the second ring. I could hear the television in the background, low, and the clink of a teacup being set down.
“Christopher,” she said, faintly.
“I owe you an apology. The hospital. What I said to you. I shouldn’t have spoken to you like that.” I leaned back in my chair and pressed my thumb and forefinger against the bridge of my nose. “You were trying to help. And I repaid that by snapping at you like a child.”
“You were upset.”
“That’s not an excuse.”
“No. It’s not.” Another pause. The teacup clinked again. “And I should apologize too.”
“You don’t need to—”
“I do.” Her voice changed. The brisk, commanding Eleanor was gone. In its place, something weaker than I’d ever heard. Guilty. “I’m sorry, Christopher. For all of it. For what this family did to you.”
I didn’t speak.
“I watched Patrick treat you like a punishment instead of a child, and I fought him, but I didn’t fight hard enough.
I should have taken you out of that house.
I should have gone to court, hired lawyers, done whatever it took to get you away from him and Esmeralda.
Instead I negotiated. I compromised. I told myself that some access was better than none, that seeing you on weekends was enough, that the holidays and the summers would make up for the rest of it.
” Her voice wavered. “It wasn’t enough. And you paid for my cowardice with your childhood. ”
“Grandmother—”
“Let me finish.” She took a breath. “I know how much this family has hurt you. I know because I watched it happen and I carry that every day. I stood there and said nothing because I was afraid of losing access to you entirely.” Her voice broke on the word.
“You deserved better. From Patrick. From Esmeralda. From all of us. And especially from me.”
I sat in my study with the phone pressed to my ear, eyes burning, but couldn't say anything because there were no words for what I was feeling.
Gratitude, grief, and the particular ache of hearing someone say the thing you needed to hear for thirty years and realizing it still hurt even when it came with love.
“However, I’m trying to make it right,” she said. “With the company. With you. And with Miley.” A pause. “Which brings me to my condition for accepting your apology.”
“You have conditions?”
“I always have conditions. You know this about me.” The brisk Eleanor was back, just slightly, enough to tell me she was pulling herself together. “Don’t hurt her, Christopher. If you hurt her, I will not forgive you. And I am the one person in this family whose forgiveness you actually want.”
“I know.”
“Do you? Because the way you dragged her out of that hospital room suggests otherwise.”
“I know, Grandmother. I’m working on it.”
“Work faster.” A small sigh on the other end of the line. When she spoke again, her voice was gentler. “She’s good for you, Christopher. Don’t let your fear ruin the best thing that’s walked into your life.”
We said goodbye. I set the phone down and sat in the dark for a while, letting the conversation settle into the spaces where it needed to go.
The kiss was the other thing I couldn’t outrun.
Two days. It had been two days since the gallery and I could still feel it. Not the physical sensation, that was memory, neural pathways firing on repeat, easy to dismiss. What I couldn’t dismiss was the silence. The three seconds during the kiss when every noise in my head stopped.
The company, the board, Esmeralda, Dominic, Paul Hargrove’s silver-tongued campaign to remove me, all of it, gone. Like someone had found the master switch for the machine that had been running nonstop inside my skull since I was six years old and flipped it off.
Three seconds of quiet. That’s all it was. And I’d been chasing the echo of it for forty-eight hours like a man dying of thirst who’d been handed water and then had the glass taken away.
Damn it.
I’d kissed co-stars on camera a hundred times. It was mechanics. Angles, pressure, and duration calibrated to whatever the director wanted. I could kiss a woman and plan my dinner simultaneously. It meant nothing. It was part of the job.
But when my lips touched Miley’s, my brain didn’t plan dinner. My brain didn’t plan anything. She kissed me back and for three seconds I was just a man kissing a woman and nothing else existed.
Great. I was fucked. I was completely, absolutely, irreversibly fucked.
“Shit,” I said to nobody, sitting at my desk at Vale Industries, staring at a quarterly report I’d been pretending to read for the past twenty minutes.
The office door opened without a knock. Paul Hargrove walked in like he owned the building, which he did not, despite the way he carried himself.
“Christopher. A moment?”
I didn’t invite him to sit. He sat anyway.
“The board has concerns,” he said, folding his hands on his knee. “About the public incidents. The general… instability.”
“The board has concerns, or you have concerns?”
“The board, Christopher. I’m merely the messenger.”
“You’re the messenger who’s been having lunches with my stepmother for three weeks.
” I set down my pen and looked at him. “I know about the dinners, Paul. The phone calls. The quiet conversations in hallways after meetings. If you’re going to campaign against me, at least have the decency to do it openly instead of hiding behind Esmeralda’s skirt. ”
Paul’s expression didn’t change but his posture did. The comfortable lean became something more rigid. “I’m not campaigning against you.”
“Then stop briefing my stepmother on internal board discussions. Stop feeding her information to use against me. And stop walking into my office without knocking, because this is my office, not yours, and the nameplate on the door says Vale.” I held his gaze. “Are we clear?”
Paul studied me for a long moment. Whatever he saw must have recalibrated something in his assessment, because when he stood, he buttoned his jacket and said, “Perfectly clear, Mr. Vale,” and left without the satisfied smile he’d walked in with.
I watched the door close, then turned back to the quarterly report. The numbers swam.
“Damn it,” I said again.
I couldn’t focus. Not when it came to her.
The data points accumulated without my permission.
She was awake before me every morning. The kitchen smelled different each day depending on what she was making, and I’d started identifying the dishes by scent before I reached the bottom of the stairs.
Tuesday was garlic and rosemary, which meant roasted something.
Wednesday was cinnamon, which meant she was baking.
Thursday smelled like coconut and lime. I stood on the landing for thirty seconds, just breathing it in—before I remembered I was a grown man on my own staircase, inhaling the cooking smells of a woman who had slapped me across the face a few weeks ago.
She talked to my grandmother with genuine warmth. The real kind that made my grandmother’s color come back and her appetite return. Her laughter rang through the house in a way it hadn’t since before Dominic’s accident.
She left foil-covered plates in the kitchen every night.
The sticky notes were the newer development.
They’d started appearing after the gallery kiss, the same week, like she’d decided that if she was going to feed me, she might as well make it entertaining.
She’d written, This is for the food thief on one of the sticky notes once.
I ate every plate. Every single one. And I kept the sticky notes in my desk drawer, stacked neatly in the order they arrived. I didn’t think about why I was keeping them because thinking about why would require admitting something I was not prepared to admit.
She was warm. That was the thing that undid me most. After everything I’d done to her, the kiwi, the lies, what I did in the hospital corridor that I still couldn’t believe I’d actually done, she was warm.
Not to me specifically. To the house. To Carlos, who she’d turned into her biggest fan by feeding him breakfast. To Diego, who now left fresh flowers on the kitchen counter every morning as a thank-you for the empanadas she’d made him.
To everyone she encountered, Miley Torres radiated a kindness that wasn't strategic or performative or conditional.
It was just who she was—the way cooking was who she was, fundamental and built in.
She wasn't calculating. She wasn't playing an angle. She was just good. I'd stopped believing that kind of goodness existed, because everyone in my life had an agenda and hers was apparently to feed me, make my grandmother laugh, and leave angry-face sticky notes on my door.
And I didn’t deserve her. She deserved better than a man who manufactured a crisis to avoid a company he didn’t want and used her restaurant as the stage.
She deserved someone who hadn’t destroyed her life by an impulsive move. Someone who could sit across from her at breakfast, eat the food she’d made, say thank you, and give her all the appreciation she deserved.