Chapter 10
THE MISREAD
Iwake up with the taste of smoke still behind my teeth.
Not real smoke — the alarm went off hours ago, the fan cleared the air, the pizza buzzer went and I answered it because Ethan was still on the floor.
We ate from the box between us, and afterward getting him back up turned into its own terrible little operation: crutches dragged close, his hand locked on the cabinet edge, my hand braced between his shoulder blades because there was nowhere else to put it that didn't feel like too much.
He made a joke about emergency exits. I pretended to laugh.
Then I scrubbed the pan until my knuckles ached, scrubbing right through the non-stick coating until I could see my distorted reflection in the bare metal underneath.
I scrubbed it twice more after that and then threw it out anyway.
But the taste is still there. Going nowhere.
My first thought is: don't go into the kitchen.
My second thought is: you live here. Temporarily. You have to go into the kitchen.
My third thought is what I look like right now — Ethan's old Canadiens shirt, my hair a wreck, yesterday's mascara undoubtedly smudged under my eyes in that way that only looks good on women in French movies and never, ever on me.
I grab my phone. 6:43 AM. The apartment is still dark.
From the bedroom, through the half-open door, I can hear Ethan — long, even, steady, sleeping like a person with a clear conscience.
I get up. I go to the bathroom. I turn on the light and look at the mirror and the woman looking back is exactly the disaster I expected: swollen eyes, pillow crease across one cheek, the ghost of flour still in her hairline.
You cried on his kitchen floor.
I step into the shower. The water is as hot as I can stand. I scrub the flour out of my hair. I scrub the smell of burnt oil off my skin. I try to scrub the kitchen floor out of my head. It doesn't work.
I step out. I towel off. I open my makeup bag.
Foundation first. Then concealer — under both eyes, blended until the edges disappear.
Then brows. Then mascara, two coats, the waterproof kind that takes a geological event to remove.
Blush. Lip. I line my lips today, which I don't usually do, which is probably fine and definitely not a symptom of anything.
By the time I'm done, the woman in the mirror is assembled. Competent. The kind of person who handles things.
I walk to the kitchen.
The element is still there, and the counter, and the spot on the floor where I sat, and the specific angle of light from the window above the sink that hits the cabinet exactly where my back was pressed against it when I fell apart.
My stomach drops. Not a metaphor — a physical sensation, like missing a step, except I'm standing still.
I open the fridge. I close the fridge. I fill the kettle. I make coffee. I make it correctly. I make it like a person who knows how to operate a kitchen without triggering a biohazard response.
Bagel appears. He rubs against my ankle and looks up with the expression of a creature who witnessed last night's full emotional collapse and has already forgotten. I envy him.
"Morning," I say. My voice is steady. Good.
Derek's email comes at 8:17 AM while I'm trying to figure out how to make scrambled eggs without making scrambled eggs look like I'm trying to prove something.
Hey Nora — so the wife changed her mind about the headings. She wants Playfair Display now, but still wants the whole thing to feel "rustic." Can you mock up 3 options by end of day? Also sending over revision 7 of the full menu suite. Sorry. — D
Revision 7. I close my eyes. I count to three. I open them.
Derek Ouellette runs a bistro in Griffintown that's been "two months from opening" for the past five months.
I'm doing his entire visual identity — menus, signage, website, social media kit, the works.
A project that pays well enough to justify the headaches, and Derek's headaches are legendary.
His wife has opinions. His business partner has different opinions.
Derek has the opinions of whoever spoke to him last.
"Everything okay?" Ethan's voice from the living room.
I heard the slow, heavy thumps of his crutches making their way from the bedroom twenty minutes ago, but neither of us had said a word.
He's on the couch, propped up with the two pillows I arranged yesterday, his crutches leaned against the arm rest.
"Work thing," I say. I smile. The smile is flawless. I know this because I've been rehearsing it for most of my adult life.
I set up my laptop on the small kitchen table and start working. This is fine. I can handle Derek and Playfair Display and revision 7 and the faint ghost-smell of burnt oil that I'm probably imagining. I'm a professional. I'm a functioning adult. I did not cry on anyone's floor.
Then the buzzer goes. A short, sharp burst. Before I can stand up, there's the sound of a key in the lock.
Camille arrives like weather.
Not a storm — nothing that dramatic. More like a pressure change.
She comes through the door with a reusable bag in each hand and her coat already half-off, calling something in French to Ethan that I catch the shape but not the content of, and she's in the kitchen before I've finished processing that she just let herself in.
"Salut, Nora!" She smiles at me — genuine, bright, a smile that comes from someone who has never had to practice it. "T'as déjeuné?"
"I — yes. Coffee."
"Coffee n'est pas déjeuner." She's already unpacking. Cutting board. Onions. A block of cheese I don't recognize. Herbs in a plastic bag. She moves through Ethan's kitchen the way I move through my own apartment — without thinking, without checking, without opening the wrong drawer first.
She opens the spice cupboard. She reaches for the oregano without looking.
I didn't know there was oregano.
She finds a pot — the tall one, behind the rice cooker — and fills it at the sink.
She knows which element works better. She turns on the smaller one, the one on the left, the one I didn't use last night because I used the big one and the big one was too hot and the heat was uneven and the oil started spitting and —
I stop. I breathe.
My phone buzzes. Derek again. The wife thinks the hero banner is "too aggressive." Can we soften? Also — any chance we move the tagline down? Appreciate it!!
From the living room, I hear Ethan and Camille talking.
His voice is different with her — lighter, faster, peppered with the Québécois slang he never uses with me.
She says something I don't catch and he laughs.
A real laugh, not the careful kind. She calls back a question about whether he still has bay leaves and he says third shelf, behind the paprika, and she finds them without hesitating.
She's making a soupe aux légumes. I can tell from the smell — onion, celery, carrot, the holy trinity of comfort food in every francophone kitchen I've ever been in. I know this soup. I could make this soup.
But I didn't.
He must have called her. Or she came on her own — Camille does things like that, just shows up, just handles it. Either way, the morning after I set off his smoke alarm and cried on his floor, there's a woman in his kitchen making soup from memory, and it isn't me.
The thought settles into the place where last night's shame left a convenient empty space.
He watched you ruin his pan and cry into a dish towel and talk to his cat like a woman who has lost the thread, and the next morning his sister is here, doing the thing you couldn't do, and she isn't even trying hard.
This isn't jealousy. Camille is his little sister. She's twenty-three and very sweet and she once announced in his hospital room that her boyfriend's was "pretty average" just to make him laugh through the morphine, and I like her. This isn't about Camille.
This is about the fact that she knows where the oregano is and I don't.
"Nora, tu veux go?ter?" She's holding out a wooden spoon, asking if I want a taste. The soup smells perfect. She looks at me with the easy generosity of a person who belongs here.
"?a sent bon." I taste it. It's delicious. Of course it's delicious.
I go back to my laptop. I soften the banner.
I mock up three heading options in Playfair Display, each one somehow managing to be both rustic and aggressive despite my best efforts.
I respond to Derek with the professionalism of a woman whose internal organs are not currently rearranging themselves in shame.
When I bring Ethan his bowl, my hands don't shake. My posture is correct. I even manage a joke about Camille being a better cook than both of us, and it lands — he smiles, she laughs, the room is warm and normal and fine.
I am performing at a level I have not reached in weeks. Every gesture calibrated. Every word the right weight. The display version of Nora Chen, now in 4K resolution, no buffering.
The worse thing is: it's working. Everyone believes it. Why wouldn't they? I'm very, very good at this.
Sophie shows up around eleven.
She looks tired — five days in Toronto for a new social media strategy pitch, dark circles under her eyes that she hasn't bothered to conceal because Sophie doesn't conceal things, which is one of the many differences between us that I try not to think about too hard.
She's been by a few times since the accident — brought that weird bone broth to the hospital, dropped off Ethan's charger once — but this is the first time she's been here since I moved in.
"Hey." She drops her bag by the door and takes off her boots and looks toward the couch where Ethan is propped up with Bagel on his lap. "Hey, Ethan. How's the — everything?"
"Still broken," he says. "But the cat's doing great."