14. Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fourteen
Julia
With one additional week of recovery ahead, I’ve decided to make productive use of my time.
This is what I tell myself at eight that morning, moments before Rhazgar arrives with the broth and we both do an admirable job of pretending everything is perfectly normal.
He asks how I slept. I say fine. He checks my ankle with the same thorough attention he always gives it.
I drink the broth. He rinses the bowl. Neither of us mentions last night.
His grandmother’s hair comb is holding my hair up. I put it in this morning without deciding to. He notices, then glances at the recipe on the counter, still folded where I left it. He looks at it for one long moment, then returns his gaze to me.
He leaves at his usual time. I sit in the kitchen with my coffee and gaze at the recipe for a long time.
Then I open my laptop.
Not to find things out. I already know what I need to know. He told me. But knowing a thing and understanding it are different. I pull up every source I’ve been avoiding all week, the ones that felt like prying before. Now they feel like homework I owe him.
The cultural anthropology paper I find midmorning stops me cold, not because it reveals something new but because it confirms something he said.
Buried in the methodology section is a note about WarmHearth clan specifically: that certain healing preparations are not general-purpose.
That they’re reserved. That who you make them for, and how, communicates something the researcher clearly struggled to translate.
She ends up using the phrase “relational declaration” and moving on quickly, as if she knew she’d only gotten close to the real meaning.
Relational declaration.
I sit back. He told me last night in plain language what he’d done and why. Still, seeing it confirmed in academic text, that these meals have been something specific, something with intention, three times a day for six days, makes it land differently. Not worse. Just more real.
I’m still angry about being managed. I meant what I said about that. But I understand, sitting here with the paper in front of me and the recipe on the counter and my hair up in carved bone worn smooth by his grandmother’s hands, that the meals themselves were never the wrong part.
A heavy knock at the door.
I don’t even need to ask.
“Grulk,” I call. “It’s open.”
He comes in with his toolbox, noticeably subdued. His gaze moves around the condo: the research spread on the table, the recipe on the counter, my hair, then finally me. He’s reading the room with more subtlety than he usually bothers with.
“The bookcase,” he says, gesturing at it. “HammerFall follow-up inspection.”
“The bookcase is fine, Grulk.”
“Yes,” he agrees. “It is.” He sits down anyway after gently setting the toolbox on the floor. “Rhazgar said you finally had the conversation.”
“Okay.”
Grulk glances at the recipe on the counter for a moment. “He gave you the hair comb,” he says, mostly to himself. Something in his expression shifts, that particular HammerFall sentimentality he usually buries under noise. “I didn’t think he would. I hoped, but doubted it.”
“Tell me about her,” I say. “What you know.”
He looks at me for a moment, as if deciding something. Then he leans back in the chair.
He talks for a while. Not about courtship traditions, not about WarmHearth clan protocol.
About a woman who smelled like herbs even in her sleep, who taught a young orc to cook not because it was duty but because she believed food was how you said the things that wouldn’t fit in words.
Who spent her last two years on Earth teaching Rhazgar everything she knew, faster than was comfortable, because she understood something about her own health that she didn’t share with him until near the end.
“She was making sure he knew everything before she was gone. Deliberately. He’s always thought he ended up carrying those traditions because everyone else was gone. If he understood that she chose him on purpose, with complete confidence, it might feel less like chance and more like a gift.”
I sit with that for a moment.
I’m still angry. That hasn’t changed. But all these years, Rhazgar has believed he was carrying grief when what his grandmother left him was trust.
No one has ever told him.
Grulk said she believed food was how you said the things that wouldn’t fit in words.
I have something to say to Rhazgar that won’t fit in words.
I think about the recipe on the counter.
Twelve ingredients I’ll have to source. Instructions in two languages, one of which I can’t read.
A dish I’ve never made, written down for the first time by a man who never wrote it down before, given to someone who made pasta from a jar last night and called it dinner.
I have spent years keeping careful distance from things I couldn’t footnote. This is me stepping across my own line, armed with a recipe I barely understand and no guarantee of anything. It is going to be a disaster. I’m going to make it anyway.
I look at the recipe on the counter.
“I’m going to cook for him tonight,” I say. “His grandmother’s recipe. For him.”
Grulk is quiet for a moment. Then, “You understand what that means.”
“Yes.”
“In our tradition—”
“I know what it means, Grulk.”
He looks at me for a long moment. Then he stands and picks up his toolbox.
“The bookcase looks good,” he says. “Very secure. Excellent work.” He heads for the door, pauses. “He’s been alone for a long time.”
“I know.”
“He knows how to be in a room with someone and still be entirely alone. He’s been doing it for eight years. Don’t let him.”
He leaves.
I sit with that for a while. Then I reach for my phone. There’s a text from Eliza already waiting: Committee confirmed for the 21st. Harrison wants your presenter bio by Friday. Please tell me you have one.
I type back: I have one. Give me an hour.
Then I open a new message. Are we still on for tonight? I type. I thought I might cook.
The three dots appear. Disappear. Reappear.
I would be honored. May I bring anything?
Just yourself. And maybe a little patience. My kitchen skills are not what yours are.
His reply comes after a moment.
Patience I can provide.
Should I also bring emergency provisions?
I laugh out loud.
That’s rude.
Preparedness is not rudeness.
You think this is going to be that bad?
The dots appear almost immediately this time.
I think you are trying something difficult because it matters to you. Those attempts deserve backup plans, not criticism.
I smile despite myself.
Come hungry anyway.
Always.
I set the phone down and look at his grandmother’s recipe, perhaps her most cherished possession, written first in his native language, with the English translation in a separate column. Every measurement exact.
I pick it up and carry it to the kitchen.