9. Liliana
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Liliana
The onions are the only thing making me cry today, and honestly, I’ll take it.
I’ve been in Danica’s kitchen for two hours, which is about an hour and forty-five minutes longer than the recipe actually requires, but that’s not the point.
The point is the chopping. The point is the steady, mindless rhythm of it, knife against board, the little pile of diced onion growing under my hands, the way I have to pay just enough attention that there’s no room left in my head for anything else.
No headlines, no lawyers, no husband.
Just dinner.
Cooking has always been the thing I reach for when the world gets too loud.
My mother hired chefs my whole childhood and never once set foot in a kitchen, which is probably exactly why I love it, because it’s mine, it’s the one warm domestic thing nobody taught me to be perfect at.
I can burn a sauce and no one grades me on it.
I can stand here in Danica’s borrowed apron and stir a pot and pretend, for whole minutes at a time, that my life is a normal-sized thing I can hold in two hands.
I tip the onions into the pan and they hit the oil with a hiss, and the smell blooms up warm and sweet, and just like that, without permission, I’m somewhere else.
I’m standing at our stove in the penthouse, early on, when everything was still so new it didn’t feel real that I got to keep it.
I’ve got a wooden spoon in one hand and my hair falling out of its clip and I’m trying to follow a recipe on my phone when two arms slide around my waist from behind, and a mouth finds the bare curve of my shoulder, and I feel him smile against my skin before he even says anything.
“You started without me.” Tristan’s voice is low and warm against my neck. “I was promised I could help.”
“You were promised no such thing. The last time you helped, you set a dish towel on fire.” I keep stirring, biting down on a smile. “You’re on strict observation duty. From over there.”
“Mm. No.” He kisses the spot just below my ear, then the next one down, unhurried, like we have all the time in the world, which back then we did. “I don’t think I can do that.”
“Tristan.” I mean for it to sound stern. It comes out closer to a sigh. “The sauce.”
“Forget the sauce.”
“I am not forgetting the sauce, I’ve been working on this sauce for…”
He turns me around by the hips, easy, and the spoon clatters somewhere onto the counter, and then he’s kissing me properly, one hand cradling my jaw and the other splayed warm against the small of my back, and the sauce, I have to admit, becomes a distant and unimportant concern.
“Lunch is postponed,” he murmurs against my mouth.
“We can’t just…”
“We can. We absolutely can.” And then he’s ducking down and lifting me clean off my feet with one arm hooked under me, the show-off, and I’m laughing and grabbing at his shoulders and swatting at him all at once.
“Tristan! The stove is on!”
“So it’s a race.” He reaches back and clicks the burner off without even looking, because of course he does, and hoists me higher, and I give up.
I stop fighting it. I wrap my legs around his waist and loop my arms around his neck and press my laugh into his throat as he carries me out of the kitchen, both of us grinning like idiots, the sauce abandoned, the whole bright ordinary morning ours to waste however we wanted.
Back when wasting a morning together was a thing we still knew how to do.
The pan spits, and a fleck of hot oil catches the side of my hand, and I hiss and jerk back into the present so fast it leaves me dizzy.
“Ow. Damn it.” I shake my hand out, press the little stinging spot to my mouth.
It’s nothing, a red pinprick, gone in an hour. But my eyes are wet in a way the onions can’t account for anymore, and my chest has done that awful caving-in thing, and I stand there in my cousin’s kitchen holding my own hand like it might fall off, missing a man who doesn’t exist.
Because that’s the truth of it.
That Tristan, the one who turned off the burner without looking and carried me off laughing, I don’t think he’s real anymore.
Maybe he hasn’t been for a long time. I mourned him for months before I ever left, sat in that penthouse night after night waiting for him to walk back through the door, and he just never quite did. What walked back in was a tired stranger with his face who apologized a lot.
I turn the burner off. I’m not hungry anymore.
There’s no way for him to reach me now even if he wanted to. I changed my number two days ago, deactivated every account, pulled myself clean off the grid, and the silence since has been its own kind of medicine, no notifications, no comments, no strangers, no him.
Just quiet. Just me and Danica and the slow work of figuring out who I am when nobody’s watching and nobody’s leaving.
The doorbell rings.
I wipe my hands on the apron and go to answer it, expecting a package, expecting Danica having forgotten her keys, expecting anyone in the world except who’s actually standing on the step.
My mother.
“Mother.” I hold the door and don’t open it any wider than I have to. “How did you even know I was here?”
“You’re my daughter.” Aurelia says it as if that explains everything, which in her world it does. “I know where your cousin lives. May I come in, or would you prefer we do this on the doorstep for the neighbors?”
I step back and let her pass, because there’s no version of this where I win, there never is.
She moves into Danica’s small bright living room like a swan into a duck pond, taking it in, and I brace myself. For the assessment. For the comment about the apron, or the state of my hair, or the fact that I’m hiding in a guest room instead of handling my collapse with dignity.
For the inevitable, gently delivered I told you so that I have been dreading since the second the lights went down at the Forum.
“So.” I cross my arms. “Are you here to tell me you were right? Because you were. You can say it. You’ve earned it, God knows you’ve waited long enough.”
My mother turns around, and the look on her face isn’t what I expected at all.
“No,” she says quietly. “I’m not here for that.”
I blink. “You’re not?”
“I came to see how you are.” She sets her handbag down on the arm of the couch, and her hands, I notice, aren’t quite steady.
“I saw the… the coverage. Everyone has. And I know that whatever else is between us, this must be one of the worst things you’ve ever gone through, and I couldn’t sit in that house one more day knowing you were suffering through it without your mother.
” She lifts her chin, and there’s a brittleness to it, like she’s doing a thing that costs her. “So. I’m here. To check on you.”
For a moment I genuinely don’t know what to say. In twenty-some years I’m not sure my mother has ever once shown up simply to check on me. Every visit came with an agenda, a correction, a suitor, a standard I’d failed to meet.
“Who are you,” I say slowly, “and what have you done with Aurelia Astor?”
The corner of her mouth twitches, almost a smile. “I deserve that.”
“Mother, I’m sorry, I just…” I press my fingers to my forehead.
“The last time we talked, at your house, you tore my marriage apart at the dinner table. You told me I was a fool for defending him. And now the whole thing has blown up in exactly the way you said it would, and you show up here and you’re being kind, and I don’t, I don’t know what to do with that. I was braced for the lecture.”
“I know.”
She lowers herself onto the edge of the couch, spine straight as ever, but her voice goes soft in a way I’ve almost never heard from her.
“And that is precisely why I’m not giving you one.
I have spent your whole life managing you, Liliana.
Correcting you. Preparing you for a world I was terrified would eat you alive.
And after our last conversation, after everything you said to me before you walked out, I have been forced to sit with the possibility that all my managing did was teach you that your mother’s love came with conditions. ”
She swallows.
“I don’t want to be one more person in your life who only shows up to tell you what you did wrong.”
My throat goes tight. “Mom…”
It slips out before I can stop it. Not Mother. Mom. I haven’t called her that since I was small.
Her eyes shine, just faintly, and she blinks it away with the discipline of a woman who has spent sixty years not crying in front of people.
“So no,” she says. “No I-told-you-so. I’m just asking, as your mother, in a way that doesn’t have strings on it, what do you need? Right now. Tell me and it’s yours.”
And the thing is, I have to think about it, because no one has asked me that in longer than I can remember. What do I need. Not what do I want to fix, not what’s the plan, not how do I survive the news cycle. What do I need.
“Honestly?” My voice cracks a little. “I think I just needed to not feel so alone in this. That’s it. That’s the whole thing.”
“Then you won’t.” She says it plainly, like a fact, like a vow.
“You’re not alone in it. I’m slow, Liliana, and I’m difficult, and I have a great deal to make up for, and I don’t expect you to forgive years of me in a single afternoon.
But I would like to try. If you’ll let me. We can go as slowly as you need.”
“I’d like that.” And I find, to my surprise, that I mean it. “As a process. Not, not everything fixed today. But, yeah. I’d like to try too.”
“Good.” She stands, gathering herself, the moment of softness folding neatly back behind her composure, because she can only do so much of this at once and we both know it.
But the ground between us has shifted, and we both know that too.
“There’s one more thing, and on this I am not going to negotiate with you. ”
“Of course there is.”