Read Chapter 4: The First Meal

The kitchen at the inn was a museum of good intentions. Copper pots hung in gleaming rows above a butcher-block island scarred with knife marks. A six-burner Viking range squatted against the far wall like a monument. Professional-grade. Someone had loved this room once.

Maren opened the Sub-Zero refrigerator and stared at a half-empty jar of pickles, a stick of butter, and something unidentifiable wrapped in foil that she had no intention of investigating. The pantry was worse: stale saltines, a can of cream of mushroom soup with a use-by date from last decade, and two bay leaves swimming in a jar of dust.

The pantry door groaned when she closed it.

She had cooked for three hundred covers a night at the height of her career. Plated scallops with precision while the pass printer screamed tickets. And now she couldn't muster a single decent meal in her own inheritance. There was something almost insulting about the emptiness. Her grandmother had lived here alone near the end, hadn't she? A woman who, from the photo albums, had baked bread and canned tomatoes and fed half the town.

The front door rattled. Maren froze.

The sound came again—knuckles on wood, not the wind. She crossed to the foyer and pulled open the heavy oak door to find Julian Hale standing on the porch, snow dusting his shoulders like powdered sugar. He wore a charcoal wool coat, no hat, and he looked at her with the mild irritation of someone who had walked to the end of the earth and found it inconveniently staffed.

"Tea," he said.

Maren blinked. "Excuse me?"

"The kitchen. I can smell gas. You've been in there." He stepped past her without waiting for an invitation, leaving wet footprints on the floorboards. "The Tetley's finished. I need something with caffeine. There's a tin of lapsang souchong in the pantry, bottom shelf, behind the—"

"There's nothing behind the soup can. I just looked."

Julian stopped mid-stride and turned. His face did something complicated—surprise, then annoyance, then a flicker of something she couldn't name. "Clem stocks it on the first of every month."

"Well, Clem hasn't been here in a while." Maren crossed her arms. "And unless you're planning to sip pickle juice, you're out of luck."

He stared at her. She stared back. The grandfather clock by the stairs ticked like a metronome keeping time to their mutual irritation.

"It's a two-mile walk to the general store," he said finally. "In a blizzard."

"The blizzard's over."

"The next one's coming. The radio said snow by dinner." He rubbed the bridge of his nose. He looked tired, Maren noticed. The kind of tired that had nothing to do with sleep. "Look, I came down to ask a favor."

"To make tea?"

"To negotiate." He reached into his coat and pulled out a worn leather wallet. "I'll give you two hundred dollars a week for groceries. You cook. I eat. We maintain a professional distance."

"I don't want your money."

"Then what do you want?"

The question caught her off guard. She wanted the heat to stay on. She wanted the pipes not to burst. She wanted to stop waking up at four in the morning convinced she'd heard the front door opening, even though it was just the wind rattling the storm windows. She wanted to know why a stranger's wooden bird sat on a desk behind a locked door in her grandmother's inn.

"I want to know what you're doing here," she said.

Julian's jaw tightened. For a moment, she thought he'd walk out. But instead, he set his wallet on the hall table with a small, deliberate click.

"I'm writing a book," he said. "I've been blocked for nine months. My publisher gave me until March or I owe back my advance. A quarter of a million dollars." He said it flatly, like reading a grocery list. "Your grandmother offered me this room six months ago. I thought the isolation would help. It didn't."

Maren wanted to hold onto her anger; it was the only warm thing she'd felt all day. But she recognized the shape of his confession. She'd stood in a walk-in freezer at two a.m. after a bad review and told the sous chef she was quitting, and her voice had sounded just like that. Hollow. Careful.

"I'll cook," she said. "But not for the money."

"What, then?"

"You tell me how you knew my grandmother."

Julian's mouth pressed into a thin line. For a long moment, the only sound was the house settling around them, wood groaning against the cold.

"I'll answer that," he said, "when I've written something worth saying." He turned and started up the stairs. "Fish and chips is acceptable. I'm not a picky man."

"I never agreed to fish and chips."

"You're a chef," he called down, without looking back. "You'll figure it out."

The general store had exactly one kind of fish—frozen cod in a cardboard box—and potatoes that were slightly past their prime. Maren bought what she could and carried the bags back through the deepening snow, the cold biting her cheeks until they went numb. By the time she reached the inn, her fingers had gone stiff around the handles.

She cooked like she was auditioning. It was ridiculous. He was rude and evasive and he was paying her two hundred dollars a week for the privilege of eating her food. But something in her needed to prove that she could still do this—that the flame hadn't gone out, only banked.

She floured the cod with cornmeal and spices she found in a tin labeled "Clem's Blend" that was nearly empty but still fragrant. She sliced the potatoes thin and soaked them in the pickle brine for a kick of vinegar before frying them twice, proper Belgian style. She made a quick tartar sauce from the last egg in the fridge and the pickle jar's remaining spears, chopped fine.

The inn filled with the smell of hot oil and crisp batter. For the first time since she'd arrived, the place felt less like a mausoleum and more like a home.

At seven, Julian appeared in the kitchen doorway. He'd changed into a gray sweater with a hole in the elbow, and his hair was wet, as if he'd been scrubbing his hands through it. He looked startled by the spread: the fried fish arranged on a cast-iron platter, the chips in a linen-lined basket, a small dish of tartar sauce, and a wedge of lemon she'd found in the back of the fridge, mostly shriveled but salvageable.

"You weren't supposed to do all this," he said quietly.

"Too late." Maren slid into a chair and gestured at the seat across from her. "Eat it before it gets cold."

He sat. Took a bite. Chewed slowly, and then something shifted in his expression—not quite softening, but unlocking. He took another bite, faster this time.

"This is..." He paused, searching for a word. "Unexpected."

"I'll take that as a compliment."

They ate in silence for a while. Maren watched him out of the corner of her eye. Julian Hale. She'd looked him up halfheartedly on her phone before the signal died—three novels, one Pulitzer nomination, a reputation for reclusiveness so total that his own publisher reportedly had to communicate through email. In the photographs, he looked severe, distant. Up close, he looked like a man who hadn't had a proper meal in months.

"Can I ask you something?" Maren said.

"You can ask."

"The bird. On your desk. The wooden one."

Julian's fork paused over his plate. "What about it?"

"It's the same as one in my grandmother's photograph album. She's holding it. It's carved like a chickadee."

Something passed across his face, there and gone. "Your grandmother made those," he said. "She carved them. Gave them to people she cared about." He set down his fork, and his voice roughened slightly. "I've had mine for thirteen years."

"Thirteen—"

"She gave it to me the year my first book came out." Julian wiped his mouth with a napkin and stood, gathering his plate. "I should get back to work."

"Wait." Maren stood too, and her chair scraped against the floor. "Why did she give it to you?"

Julian paused at the door. His back was to her, but in the dim hall light she could see his shoulders tense under the thin wool of his sweater.

"You'd have to ask her," he said, "but she's gone. So I suppose that's one secret the dead get to keep."

He disappeared into the shadows of the stairwell. The house creaked around her as the heat came on with a shudder, and Maren stood alone in the kitchen, surrounded by her grandmother's pots and pans and the lingering smell of fried fish, feeling close to something she couldn't quite reach.

Later, when the dishes were done and the house had gone quiet, she climbed the stairs for no reason she could name. The third-floor door stood ajar—Julian's door. She could see the edge of his desk, a stack of blank paper, and pinned to the wall above it, a photograph.

A young girl, maybe ten, laughing in a garden. Her grandmother's garden—Maren recognized the trellis, even this many years later. The girl had Julian's eyes.

She stepped back. In her room, the old key sat in the kitchen drawer where she'd left it. The brass one marked 3B. She tested its weight in her palm, then slid it into her pocket.

There was a letter. She'd need to find it. On the third floor, in his room, somewhere.