Marrying My Ex's Boss novel · Chapter 5 of 24

Chapter 5: The Kitchen

"Who was that?" Truman asked, in the car.

"My best friend," I said. "Was."

He drove the rest of the way up the Allegheny River without a word.

One big hand sat on the wheel and the other on the gearshift, an inch from my knee.

His house in Fox Chapel was gray stone with a slate roof and a green door, set back in the trees.

Inside, it was enormous and almost empty.

There was a long hall of dark portraits and a kitchen the size of my entire apartment.

The counter was black soapstone.

"Your room is the study," he said, setting my bag down. "It was my father's. There's a daybed. The walls are thin."

"How thin?"

"I can hear you turn pages."

"I don't read in bed."

"You do," he said. "I heard you on the phone with Joyce, reading her a clause."

I laughed, and he looked pleased with himself.

He made dinner.

I use the word loosely.

He stood at the stove in his shirtsleeves, reading a recipe off his phone.

He had the frown of a man defusing a bomb.

The salmon went in pale and came out black.

The smoke alarm went off.

I stood on a stool and fanned it with a dish towel while he opened every window in the house.

"I've run two hundred and forty people in Rotterdam," he said. "I can't make fish."

"You don't read the recipe," I said. "You read it like it's lying to you."

We ate grilled cheese at the counter, with the windows still open and our coats on.

He told me about his father, a little, in the dry flat voice he used for things that mattered.

His father had died in the east wing of a hospital two years ago.

Truman had gotten the call in a Dutch parking garage.

"I came home for the funeral and went back to Rotterdam two days later," he said. "I told myself it was the work."

I told him about my mother and the cafeteria, and about counting the cost of everything, always, even now.

"Four thousand one hundred dollars," he said.

"It's not about the money."

"I know."

"It's about the fact that I let him."

He looked at me.

"You didn't let him do anything. He took."

I put down the sandwich.

The kitchen was warm and smelled of smoke and butter.

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