Emily's POVHe did not burn the lunch.This was surprising enough that I said so when I walked through the door and found the kitchen island set with two plates of something that smelled genuinely good — pasta, with what turned out to be a sauce built from the cherry tomatoes and basil that had been sitting on the counter since before Italy, slightly past their best but still serviceable, which was exactly the kind of resourceful cooking that happened when someone didn't plan a meal but committed to it anyway."You're surprised," he said."I said you'd burn it.""You did.""It's not burned.""No," he agreed. "It isn't."I sat down and took a bite and it was good, simple and direct, the way food tastes when the person making it was paying attention to what they were doing rather than performing the act of cooking."Tell me what happened," he said, sitting across from me.So I told him. All of it, in the order it happened — the unexpectedly full room, Hartley's presence, the question I
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