He Canceled Our Wedding Ninety-Nine Times, So I Joined His Enemy novel · Chapter 24 of 24

Chapter 24: The Table

I woke on the first morning of my marriage to the smell of something burning.

The bed beside me was empty and still warm.

I pulled on his shirt and went down the back stairs, and found the kitchen full of smoke.

Gabriele stood at the stove in an apron that said Ines's Kitchen, holding a ramekin of black ruin.

"Don't look," he said.

"What is it?"

"It was a soufflé."

"A soufflé?"

"You mentioned once, in the car, that you'd never had a good one," he said. "I read the book."

"You read a book."

"Twice."

I started laughing, and I could not stop.

I laughed until I had to sit down at the long table, and he stood there holding the burned thing with a look of such injured dignity that I laughed harder.

"It rose," he said. "It rose, and then it didn't."

"It's perfect."

"It's charcoal."

"It's the best thing anyone ever burned for me."

He set it in the sink, wiped his hands and came over and kissed the top of my head.

"I'll try again tomorrow," he said.

"You will not. Ines will have your head."

"Ines is at the market."

"Then she'll find the pan."

He sat down across from me.

On the table between us he had set a plate of toast, a bowl of plain butter and a jar of the honey I liked.

Every item on it was one I could eat.

I looked at it, and my chest hurt, in a way that was almost sweet.

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