CHAPTER 5 What the Kitchen Knows

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There was a man sitting in the dark kitchen at two in the morning, and Elodie, one foot on the bottom step, knew who it was by the set of his shoulders.

She had come for flour. She could not sleep, and when she could not sleep she baked; it was the only prayer she had ever trusted. Hollin Hall's kitchen lay at the far end of the east wing, down steps worn smooth by two hundred years of servants, a huge, low-ceilinged room of copper pots and scrubbed wood, with a range the size of a small car. At that hour it was lit only by the glow of the banked fire, and the long table in the center looked like an island.

Julian had taken off his jacket and his tie. His shirt sleeves were rolled to the elbows, and he sat with a mug of cold tea between his hands, looking at nothing. Admiral lay on his feet. Neither of them looked up when she came in, and for a long moment she stayed on the bottom step, listening to the fire tick and the dog sigh.

"You can't sleep either," said Julian.

"I came for flour."

"It's in the third cupboard. Mrs. Pruitt hides the good butter behind the oats." He still had not turned. "She hides it from Rafe."

Elodie found the flour. She found the butter, and a bowl, and a jar of cinnamon so old the label had gone brown. She did not ask him anything. She set the oven, and washed her hands, and began to work, because her hands knew how to be brave even when the rest of her was not.

After ten minutes, without a word, he stood and came to the other side of the table.

"Tell me what to do."

"You don't bake."

"I can follow instructions. I run a shipping line."

So she showed him. She put his hands into the dough, and he held them there like a man handling something live, and she told him to push, and fold, and push again. "Don't be afraid of it. It likes to be worked. It gets better." His forearms were strong and pale, with a thin, silvery scar over the left wrist that she did not ask about. Flour spread up his sleeves. A white smear ended up on his cheekbone. He did not seem to notice, and she did not tell him.

"Harder," she said. "You're apologizing to it."

"I am not."

"You are. Push like you mean it."

He pushed. The dough, offended, pushed back, and a small, shocked huff of a laugh escaped him. It was the first thing she had heard him do in two days that sounded like pleasure.

"Cordelia told you something," he said, to the dough.

"She told me to ask you about the week of your parents' funeral."

His hands stopped.

The kitchen was very quiet. A log shifted in the range and the sparks went up the flue in a small, bright rush. Elodie did not fill the silence. She waited, with her hands in the flour, and thought of her mother, who had once said that the kindest thing you can give a frightened person is a task and a space.

"Section Twelve," said Julian, hoarsely. "I owe you the truth about this."

"You don't have to tonight."

"I do." He pushed the dough, once, with the heel of his hand. "My parents died on the Meridian Star. One of our ships, in a storm off Newfoundland, nine years ago in March. They were traveling on it because my father liked to do that. He liked to walk the decks, talk to the crew, eat bad coffee in the galley. He was a very ordinary man for someone so rich. My mother went with him because she loved him. Because she loved anything he loved."

Elodie's throat closed.

"I was twenty-five. I was in a conference room in Geneva negotiating port fees when the call came. I finished the meeting." He said it flatly, a man reading the charge against himself. "Eleven more minutes. I thought it was a mistake. I thought they would call back and tell me the ship had changed course. I said, 'Let's conclude the item,' and I signed a paper, and then I got the second call."

"Julian."

Elodie did not tell him it was not his fault. She suspected he had heard that sentence a thousand times from a thousand kind people, and that every one of them had slid off him like rain off a slate roof. She asked instead, "What did you do when the second call came?"

"I stood up," said Julian. "I remember that I stood up very straight. I remember thinking that if I did not bend, I would not break."

"The week of the funeral, I went back to work. I was in the office every day, and I would not stop, and I would not cry, and I would not let her in." His jaw moved. "It's true. I was engaged to her, and she held my hand through a funeral, and the day after, I told her I couldn't see her anymore. I said it in an office. I used the word 'unsuitable.' I was twenty-five and I thought if I let one person get close, I would never be able to stand up again."

"And she says she left."

"She says it so I can hold on to some dignity. She is kinder than I deserve." He lifted his head at last. His eyes were red-rimmed and dry, and the effort of it was written all over his face. "I did not tell you because I didn't want you to look at me the way I look at myself."

Elodie wiped her hands on her apron. She came around the table slowly, one step, two, and stood before him with flour on her cheek and her heart going hard in her ribs.

"How am I looking at you?"

His gaze moved over her face, over the whole untidy, floury, determined sight of her. "Like I'm a person," he said, bewildered.

"You are. It's really the least I can do." She lifted her hand and, slowly, so he could stop her, brushed the white smear from his cheekbone with her thumb. His eyes closed. For a moment he leaned, only barely, into her palm, like a man who has been cold for nine years.

The timer on the oven went off. Both of them jumped. Admiral lifted his great head, sneezed, and went back to sleep.

"The rolls," said Elodie, laughing shakily, and spun away to the oven before she could examine what she was feeling.

They ate them at the long table, still too hot, with butter dripping through their fingers. They were not perfect. One was burnt on the bottom, as she had warned him. He ate it anyway.

"Cinnamon," he said, after a while. "It tastes like Christmas morning. My mother used to make them. I'd forgotten." He looked at the roll in his hand. "I didn't forget. I stopped letting myself remember."

"How did you know I'd say it, at tea? That you eat cinnamon rolls?"

"I didn't."

"I know. I guessed." Elodie licked sugar from her thumb. "Maybe I've spent three days figuring you out."

He gave her a long, strange, unreadable look, one of the small expressions she was learning to hunt, and under the kitchen light it did not look cold at all.

"Maybe I've spent three days letting you," said Julian.

Somewhere above them, the great clock of Hollin Hall struck three. Neither of them moved to go.