Chapter 14 #2
I’ve been marinating in that word ever since. Coming. Present tense. Active. A woman in motion, pointed in my direction.
The doorbell rings and I almost drop the knife.
“She’s knocking?” Mum asks from the counter, amused. “On her own front door?”
“Apparently.”
I wipe my hands on the towel, check my reflection in the window above the sink. Why am I checking my reflection? I never check my reflection. I’m a bloke who invented rugged nonchalance and masked it as style. My hair is unruly like this, not because of gel, it’s because I’m a side sleeper.
I open it, and Celeste is standing on her own porch holding a bottle of wine and wearing an expression that’s halfway between determination and terror.
She’s in jeans. I’ve never seen her in jeans.
Every version of Celeste I’ve encountered has been in structured trousers or blazers or that uppity cream blouse she wore to the caseworker visit.
But today it’s dark, fitted jeans and a soft gray sweater that falls off one shoulder in a way that might be intentional or might be the sweater’s own rebellion against symmetry.
Her hair is down. Minimal makeup. Flat shoes.
She looks like a person. Not a CEO, just a person who got in a car and drove forty-five minutes to knock on her own front door because she wanted to be here.
I let my eyes travel the full length of her—slowly, deliberately, not hiding it—from the flat shoes to the jeans to the exposed shoulder to the face that’s watching me watch her with an expression that dares me to comment and hopes I will.
“Did you forget the code?” I ask.
“It felt weird to just walk in.”
“It’s your house.”
“I know it’s my house. But it doesn’t feel like my house anymore. It feels like—” She pauses. Tilts her head. “Your home. I feel like a stranger walking into your home.”
“Well, we can’t have that.” I step aside, holding the door wide. “Stay the night. You’ll feel less like a stranger after a few hours. I promise.”
“Stay the night?” She raises an eyebrow. “Bold opening, Saylor. I’m just here to help…and eat of course. What smells so good?”
“I’m grilling steaks.”
“You’re grilling steaks.”
“Marinated since this morning. Pasta from scratch. Bruschetta that I will humbly describe as life-changing.”
“Life-changing bruschetta. That’s quite a claim. You know bruschetta is a whole food group to me and I will indeed give you my honest opinion.”
“That honest opinion better be, heavenly, magical, or world wonder.”
“Oh, no, no, my friend. Deep down, I’m mean-spirited like an undercover food critic. If there isn’t garlic confit in the bruschetta, I’ll have to remove a star. You’re going to have to take it like a man.”
“I have no idea what garlic confit is, so I’m going to assume I’m in trouble. But don’t worry, I can take it. I’m quite a man.”
She rolls her eyes, but I earn a soft chuckle as she steps around me and inside.
Suddenly this house—the house that I’ve been rebuilding for weeks, that I’ve painted and sanded and wired and furnished—finally feels like what it’s been trying to become.
Complete. The missing piece just walked through the front door carrying a bottle of wine and wearing what she probably thinks are casual jeans.
Not even an hour later, the kitchen is loud in the best way.
I’m at the stove tending pasta while Celeste leans against the island, a glass of wine in her hand—the one she brought because I was so focused on food, I forgot booze.
The steaks are resting on the cutting board.
The bruschetta is demolished. Celeste ate four pieces and then accused me of secretly being Italian, which is the highest compliment she’s ever given me.
“I don’t think my mom or dad ever cooked in this kitchen,” she says, and she says it with the slight disbelief of someone who has walked into a house she expected to find in renovation chaos and instead found a man doing very domestic things. “We ate so much takeout growing up.”
“Like regular-people takeout—McDonald’s, Taco Bell, KFC? Or rich-people takeout?”
She narrows her eyes. “Why does that matter?”
“Being raised on cheap, greasy questionable meat, hurled at you through drive-thru windows paints a very different picture than bags of gourmet meals from high-end restaurants. One a little pathetic, the other a little pretentious.”
“So either way, I can’t win?”
I laugh. “Let me take a guess.”
“Okay, fine. We were a little pretentious. Not at the same echelon of Whit’s family or anything, but my parents were also consumed with appearances.”
“This is why I wanted to cook,” I say, sneaking a sly smile her way. “Because you would have brought something from a restaurant that costs sixty dollars a plate and comes with a foam I’d have to pretend to understand.”
“Foam is a legitimate culinary technique.”
“Foam is soap that freed itself from the sink and snuck its way onto a plate.”
Mum laughs from the kitchen table where she’s been watching us with the barely concealed delight of a woman attending a show she bought tickets for months ago. She’s settled into the chair I positioned specifically for her—good lumbar support, arms for leverage, close to the table but not boxed in.
“Well it must sound silly to eat out when you can cook like this. You guys are living the dream.”
“Oh no, dear, don’t be fooled,” Mum says. “We don’t eat like this every night. Most nights it’s whatever he can throw together before he falls asleep on the couch with his boots still on. He’s only trying to impress you.”
“Mum.”
“What? It’s charming. Let me enjoy this.”
Celeste sets down her wineglass. She looks at my mum with that specific attentiveness that misses nothing—and then she moves.
It’s not a big movement. She pushes off from the island, crosses the kitchen in four easy steps, and wraps her arms around my mother.
The hug is careful. Gentle. She minds the spine, the posture, the places where contact could mean pain. But it’s not tentative; it’s warm and deliberate, the hug of a woman who has made a decision about someone and is communicating it through her arms instead of her words.
“I’m so glad I got to meet you, Ada,” Celeste says.
Mum’s face does something I will remember for the rest of my life. Her eyes close. Her arms come up and squeeze back with a strength that tells me the hug landed somewhere deep. And she smiles. A real one where joy takes over and moves your muscles for you. The smile I’d move mountains for.
“It’s lovely to meet you too, darling. Saylor has told me absolutely nothing about you, which means you’re probably very important.”
Celeste laughs. It’s the unguarded laugh—the one from Tidewater House, the one from the caseworker visit when I told her I’d thought about burning the loveseat. The laugh that tells me she came here tonight, unarmed. Maybe as curious as I am.
I look at the two of them together and for the briefest, most reckless moment, I let myself imagine a life where this makes sense.
Where this is permanent. Where Celeste comes home to this kitchen every night and Mum sits at that table with her tea and I cook dinner and the baby is upstairs in the sage-green nursery and the tire swing is getting use and nobody is lying and nobody is leaving.
The moment lasts three seconds. I put it away before it can become a plan.
We eat on the deck. The steaks are good—better than good.
The pasta is the recipe Mum taught me when I was fourteen, the one she learned from a neighbor in Wollongong who was actually Italian and actually knew what she was doing, unlike every other Aussie who claims their Bolognese is authentic.
The wine Celeste brought is expensive and pairs perfectly, and I pretend to know what “notes of blackcurrant” means when she describes it because I’m learning that being with Celeste would mean learning an entirely new vocabulary.
The evening is warm for the season. The oak tree throws long shadows across the yard. The tire swing hangs motionless in the still air like it’s waiting.
“This property has incredible potential,” I say, leaning back in my chair.
“The guesthouse could be expanded—add a second bedroom, update the bathroom, make it a proper studio or office space. You’d need permits, obviously.
And the backyard—there’s plenty of room for an outdoor kitchen.
Proper barbie, stone countertop, maybe a pizza oven if you’re feeling ambitious. ”
“A pizza oven,” Celeste repeats, in the tone of a woman considering a concept from another planet.
“I could build it myself. Stone and mortar. It’s not complicated.”
“And who would be operating this pizza oven? Because I want to be transparent about my culinary range.” She takes a sip of wine. “The last thing I baked was bread and cheese in a toaster oven in a dorm room which led to a small fire that we did eventually get under control.”
Mum laughs, then leans forward in her chair. “Sounds like you need someone in your life who can cook, dear.”
She beams as if she has been holding her game-winning card all night and finally found the right moment to deploy it. Celeste’s cheeks flush. I shoot Mum a look. She returns it with absolute serenity, knowing exactly what she did and she has no regrets.
“More wine?” I ask Celeste, because redirect is the only tool available to me when Mum decides to play matchmaker.
“Please.”
I pour. Celeste drinks. The evening settles around us like a blanket—warm, soft, the kind of quiet that doesn’t feel empty.
Mum tells a story about teaching me to cook when I was twelve.
At first, I hated it. Then, she told me cooking was the way to get all the girls and suddenly I was more into it.
I burned the first three attempts at scrambled eggs so badly she considered calling the fire department, and Celeste laughs until her eyes water, and Mum glows under the attention, and the deck doesn’t creak anymore because I fixed it, every board, with my own hands.
This is what it could be. This is what it could feel like every night.
I put that thought away too. I lock it in a box and throw it into the ocean.
It’s not easy, but I try to stay present and enjoy the current moment instead of planning the future ones.
But that’s what keeps me intact. A plan.
A promise. Anything to ensure that what I caused won’t consume us forever. Hope.
At quarter to seven, Mum yawns.
It is the most theatrical, least convincing yawn in the history of human performance. She tilts her head back, opens her mouth to a width that suggests she’s trying to swallow the whole sky, and produces a sound that belongs in a community theater production of Sleeping Beauty.
“Oh my,” she says, pressing the back of her hand to her forehead. “I’m suddenly so terribly exhausted. I think I’ll turn in for the night. Don’t mind me. You two enjoy the evening.”
She rises from the table with a swiftness that is completely inconsistent with a woman who is supposedly exhausted and also has a spinal injury, and retreats into the house with the brisk efficiency of a stagehand clearing props between scenes.
The deck is quiet.
Celeste looks at me. “Does your mom normally go to bed at six forty-five? Or did I scare her off?”
“No.” I grin. “She’s being my wingwoman and trying to give us privacy.”
She lets that music-laughter play again. “Privacy for what, Saylor? Why would you want to be alone with me?”
I look at her. She looks at me. The oak tree holds its breath.
“You know why,” I say.