5. Kylie
— ? —
Kylie
The market was crowded for a Sunday morning.
I’d woken up early, too early, the kind of early that meant I’d barely slept at all, and had been out the door before the sun was fully up.
The streets were quiet at that hour, just delivery trucks and joggers and the occasional dog walker looking half-asleep.
But by the time I reached the market, the crowds had arrived.
Families doing their weekly shopping, pushing strollers and carrying canvas bags.
Old women in black dresses squeezing tomatoes with the critical eye of surgeons, muttering to themselves in Italian when the produce didn’t meet their standards.
Children running between stalls while their parents pretended not to notice, their laughter echoing off the awnings.
I moved through it all with a basket over my arm and a list in my head, gathering ingredients like I was gathering evidence.
See, this is who we are. This is what we do. This matters.
The basil smelled like summer, and it put me three years back, to a kitchen, to the first Sunday of the rest of my life.
***
It was the winter after the wedding, and I had been married for four months and known my husband for none of them.
We were polite. We were careful. We shared a bed the way two strangers share an armrest on a red-eye, each of us treating the other side of the mattress as a border we’d agreed not to cross.
I had started to believe it was only that, a treaty with good linen, when Giovanni came to find me on a Sunday morning and said the first unguarded thing he had ever said to me.
“Come downstairs. I’m going to teach you a recipe, and you’re going to be terrible at it.”
The kitchen was empty. That was the first shock, in a house where someone was always awake and always watching.
He had sent the staff off for the morning, every last one of them, and rolled his sleeves to the elbow, and set a cracked recipe card on the marble the way another man might set down a relic. I’d learn that was exactly what it was.
“Nonna’s,” he said, when he caught me reading it. “She wrote it out for me the year she decided my father was raising me wrong.” He didn’t explain that. He never explained the important things straight on, back then. He put a bunch of basil in my hands instead. “Tear it. Don’t cut it.”
“Why not?”
“The knife bruises the leaves.” He said it with total gravity, this enormous man who had, that same week, resolved a dispute across town in a way I had chosen not to ask about. “They have to feel wanted.”
“They’re leaves, Giovanni.”
“Tell that to the sauce.”
I laughed at him. I told him it was ridiculous to hand feelings to a plant, and he looked at me the way you look at a building you’ve just decided is worth saving, and turned back to the tomatoes.
We cooked for three hours. He showed me how to coax the onions instead of rushing them, how to wait for the smell to go deep before you added the next thing, how his grandmother had sworn the sauce could tell the difference between a person paying attention and a person faking it.
He turned the old speaker on the counter down low, all horns and heartbreak.
At some point his hand closed over mine on the wooden spoon to guide the motion, and neither of us took it back once the motion was learned.
“You’re not stirring,” he said, low, near my ear. “You’re asking it to trust you.”
“And if it won’t?”
“Then we did it wrong, and we start over, and we are in no hurry at all.”
I had spent my entire life in a world where no one was ever in no hurry, where everything was leverage and timing and the nearest exit. And here was the most dangerous man I had ever met, telling me the afternoon had no point beyond itself.
That was the moment. Not the ring, not the altar, not the sentence he’d breathed against my ear in a language I still couldn’t read.
It was a Sunday, and basil under my nails, and a man who had memorized exactly one recipe because it was the single thing his childhood had handed him that didn’t cut going down.
When the sauce was finally right, he lifted the spoon to my mouth for the first taste and watched my face as though the verdict outranked anything waiting for him in the rest of his week. I told him it needed salt, just to see what he’d do.
He kissed me instead, basil-stained fingers in my hair, the sauce gone quiet on the stove behind us.
“It doesn’t need salt,” he said against my mouth.
“It needed something.”
“Yeah.” He pulled back just far enough to see me, and his ears had gone red. “It did.”
***
Three years ago. It could have been a decade. Or that morning. It was a room I could still walk back into, if I only came home with the right ingredients and stood in the right kitchen at the right hour.
The tomatoes were perfect, red and ripe and heavy in my palm, the kind that would melt into sauce if you looked at them the right way.
San Marzanos, which Giovanni’s grandmother had insisted were the only acceptable variety.
All others are for peasants, he’d told me once, doing his impression of Nonna Peppina. And tourists.
At Difiore’s, the pancetta guy remembered me. Big Tony, everyone called him, though he wasn’t particularly big or named Tony. Something about the way he carried himself, like he owned more than a deli counter. Like he knew things.
“Mrs. Ferraro!” He wiped his hands on his apron and grinned. “Is been too long. Where’s that husband of yours?”
“Working.” The lie came easy. “You know how he is.”
“Always working, that one. Even as a boy.” Big Tony shook his head, reaching for the pancetta without being asked. “You tell him - the next batch of prosciutto, even better. My cousin brought the pigs from Parma herself. Hand-raised, the whole thing. He’ll want to know.”
“I’ll tell him.”
“And you.” He leaned over the counter, lowering his voice like he was sharing a secret. “You keep feeding him the good stuff, yeah? Man who eats well, thinks well. Thinks well, treats his wife well. That’s what my nonna used to say.”
“Your nonna sounds like a wise woman.”
“She was.” He wrapped the pancetta in paper, folding the edges with practiced precision. “Terrible cook, though. Couldn’t boil water.”
I laughed despite myself. “Then where’d you learn?”
“My nonno.” He winked. “The women in my family, they’re good at everything except cooking. The men, we’re only good at cooking. Works out.”
I paid for the pancetta and added it to my basket, already heavier than I’d planned. Olives from the place on the corner. A wedge of parmigiano from the woman who always threw in extra because she said I was too skinny. A loaf of bread from the bakery that didn’t open until noon except on Sundays.
By the time I was done, the basket weighed a small fortune and the sun was climbing toward ten o’clock.
Sunday, I thought, walking home through streets that were starting to fill with people. One last chance.
I’d been practicing what I’d say. Not practicing, exactly, more like rehearsing. Running through scenarios in my head while I lay awake in the guest suite, staring at the ceiling that someone had painted with stars.
I know things have been hard lately. I know we’ve both been distant. But I want to try, if you want to try. I want to remember why we started this.
Or maybe: Can we talk? Really talk, not just the logistics-of-life talk. I need to know if there’s still something here worth saving.
Or maybe I wouldn’t say anything at all. Maybe I’d just stand next to him in the kitchen and let the sauce speak for itself. Let the ritual of it, the chopping and the stirring and the tasting, bridge the gap that words couldn’t cross.
We hadn’t made the sugo in two months. That was my fault, probably. I’d been pulling away since before I had words for why, and Giovanni had been working more than usual, and somewhere in the shuffle of cold sheets and missed connections, Sunday had gotten lost.
But not today.
Today I was going to come home and put my phone in the drawer and roll up my sleeves and stand in the kitchen with my husband and remember why I’d said yes to all of this in the first place.
One last Sunday.
One last chance.
The brownstone was quiet when I let myself in, that particular Sunday quiet that meant the staff had the day off and the security team was being discreet.
I balanced the grocery bags in my arms and headed for the kitchen, already planning the afternoon in my head.
Music on the old speaker, something with horns and heartbreak.
Sauce on the stove by noon. That first taste around three, standing hip to hip at the counter, arguing about whether it needed more basil or less salt.
I was halfway down the hall when I heard it.
Laughter.
In my kitchen.
Her laughter, that particular sound I’d come to know too well, the one that was always just a little too musical, a little too perfectly timed. The laugh of a woman who knew she was being watched and wanted to make sure she was being seen.
I stopped walking.
The grocery bags were cutting into my fingers, the handles leaving white lines across my palms. I could smell the basil through the paper, summer and memory and something that was supposed to be mine.
Maybe it’s not what you think, the hopeful part of my brain offered. Maybe Lucia came back early. Maybe-
But I knew.
Standing there in the hallway with my arms full of hope and San Marzanos, I already knew.
I made myself walk the last twenty feet. Through the door. Into the kitchen.
Into the end of everything.
Bianca.
In my apron.
The one with the faded sunflowers, the one Giovanni’s mother had given me on our first anniversary, the one she’d said had been in the family for three generations. Bianca was wearing it like she belonged in it, the strings tied in a neat bow at her waist, flour dusted artfully across the fabric.
There was flour on her nose too, like set dressing. Like someone had powdered it there on purpose to look charming. And maybe someone had. Maybe she’d stood in front of a mirror and applied it, just so, because she’d known I was coming.
She was standing at the stove, wooden spoon in hand, stirring something that smelled like-
Like sugo.
Like our sugo.
And Giovanni was beside her.
Sleeves rolled to the elbow, which was a crime in itself, which was supposed to be my crime, the private pleasure of watching him shed the don and become just Giovanni.
His hand was covering hers on the spoon, guiding her through the motion, patient and half-smiling.
Teaching her the technique his grandmother had shown him, the one he’d shown me on the first Sunday we’d spent in this kitchen.
“Like this,” he was saying. “Slow. You’re not stirring, you’re coaxing. Nonna used to say the sauce has to trust you before it’ll thicken.”
Bianca laughed again, that perfect laugh. “Your grandmother had a lot of opinions about sauce.”
“She had a lot of opinions about everything.”
Nonna Peppina’s recipe card was on the marble counter beside them.
The handwriting I’d memorized. The olive-oil stains on the corners. The card he’d handled like it was holy, because maybe it was, the one thing he’d kept when his father died. All of it laid out like an offering. Like a gift.
Like it was nothing.
Which meant it was nothing.
Which meant I was.
The grocery bags were cutting into my fingers and I couldn’t feel them.
There was a roaring in my ears, and under it, absurdly, the smell of my sauce, the one that was supposed to mean us, filling a kitchen with a stranger in my apron standing in it.
I wanted to scream. To throw the tomatoes at the wall.
To sink to the floor of the pantry and cry until somebody finally noticed I was gone.
Instead I set the groceries down on the counter. Quietly. Carefully. The bags rustled against the marble, and they both turned at the same moment, their faces arranged in nearly identical expressions of surprise.
Nearly. Bianca’s held something else underneath, something sharp and satisfied, there and gone so fast I almost thought I’d imagined it.
Giovanni dropped his hand from hers. “Kylie. I didn’t know you were going out.”
“The pancetta’s better from Difiore’s.” My voice didn’t waver. Amazing what you could do when you’d had practice dying in public. “For next time.”
I turned and walked out of the kitchen.
Behind me, I heard Bianca say something soft, probably sympathetic, probably concerned, probably another perfect performance for her audience of one.
“Kylie-” Giovanni’s footsteps followed me into the hall, faster than I expected. He caught up with me at the base of the stairs, caught my arm and turned me to face him. “Wait. What’s wrong?”
I looked at his hand on my arm. Then at his face. The confusion there was genuine. I could see that. He honestly didn’t understand.
And somehow, that was worse.
“It’s just cooking,” he said when I didn’t answer. “She asked about the recipe, and it would have been rude to-”
“Just.”
The word hung between us like smoke.
“It’s just cooking.” I pulled my arm free. “It’s just a recipe. And it’s just something your grandmother taught you and you taught me and now you’ve taught her, because she asked and it would have been rude-”
“Kylie, you’re overreacting.”
“What day is it, Giovanni?”
He blinked. “What?”
“What day is it?”
“It’s…” He paused. Actually had to think about it, his brow furrowing as he searched for information that should have been automatic. “Tuesday?”
Tuesday.
He thought it was Tuesday.
He’d given away Sunday, our Sunday, the only thing we had left, the room in the house where we were still us, and he’d done it on a Tuesday.
He hadn’t even spent it. Just… given it away. Like it was nothing. Like none of it had ever mattered.
I stared at him, waiting for him to realize. Waiting for understanding to dawn on his face, for him to say Oh God, the sugo, I’m so sorry, I didn’t think-
He didn’t.
“It’s Sunday,” I said quietly. “It’s Sunday, Giovanni.”
Then I turned and walked up the stairs, and I didn’t look back.