Read Chapter 17: The Recipe

The snow had stopped falling sometime before noon, leaving the world outside the kitchen window soft and impossibly white. Camille stood at the counter with her sleeves pushed past her elbows, watching Antoine lay out ingredients with the precision of a man who had done this a hundred times before.

“Tourtière,” he said, placing a heavy ceramic dish on the butcher block. “My grandmother’s recipe. She made it every Christmas Eve. My father said it was the only thing she ever made that didn’t taste like ash.”

Camille raised an eyebrow. “That’s a compliment?”

“For my grandmother, yes.” A corner of his mouth lifted. “She was not a good cook. But this—” he tapped the dish, “—this was her one gift to the world.”

He handed her an apron. It was worn denim, faded at the hem, and it smelled faintly of wood smoke. She tied it over her sweater and felt, for a moment, like she was playing dress-up in someone else’s life.

“Okay,” he said. “First lesson. The meat.”

A mound of ground pork sat on a cutting board beside a smaller mound of ground beef. He gestured for her to stand next to him at the counter.

“We brown it together. Slowly. No rush.” He looked at her sideways. “You understand slow? Or does Paris make you rush everything?”

“Paris makes you rush everything,” she admitted. “But I’m learning.”

He lit the burner and set a heavy cast-iron pan on the flame. The fat began to sizzle as he added the meat, breaking it apart with a wooden spoon.

“My father used to say the secret was patience,” he said. “You can’t force the meat to brown. It happens when it’s ready.”

Camille watched the pork turn from pink to pale gold. Steam rose, fogging the window behind the stove. Outside, the snow had drifted up against the bottom of the glass, cutting off the lower third of the world.

“My mother never cooked,” she said. “We had a woman who came three times a week. I learned to boil pasta at university and called it dinner.”

“A tragedy,” Antoine said dryly. “But we will fix you.”

He added diced onion and celery to the pan. The smell changed instantly—sharp, sweet, warming. Camille inhaled and felt something loosen in her chest, a knot she hadn’t realized she’d been carrying.

“The spices,” he said, pulling small jars from the cupboard. “Clove. Cinnamon. Nutmeg. Allspice.” He measured each into his palm, then tipped them into the pan. “My grandmother said the cinnamon was the secret.”

“And was it?”

He shrugged. “I’ve never made it without it. So I can’t tell you.”

Camille laughed. It came out easier than she expected.

They worked in companionable silence for a while. He showed her how to roll the pastry—thin, but not too thin, and to press the edges with a fork. She did it twice before he approved, and when he nodded, she felt disproportionately proud.

“Okay,” he said, wiping his hands on his apron. “Now we wait.”

“How long?”

“Three hours.”

“Three hours?” She stared at him. “We cooked everything already. Why does it need three hours?”

He leaned against the counter, crossing his arms. “Because the flavors need time to become friends. You can’t rush that.” He tilted his head, studying her. “You’re impatient. It’s very Parisian.”

“I’m not impatient,” she said. “I’m efficient. There’s a difference.”

“Is there?”

She opened her mouth to argue, then closed it. He was grinning at her, that rare, lopsided grin that made him look ten years younger. She shook her head.

“Who taught you to make this?” she asked, changing the subject.

The grin faded slightly. He looked down at the dish, his fingers tracing the crimped edges of the crust.

“My father, actually. He taught me the year I turned twelve. Said it was time I learned to feed myself, since—“ He stopped.

“Since?”

Antoine was quiet for a moment. The pan still simmered on the stove, filling the room with the scent of clove and allspice.

“Since she left,” he said finally. “He didn’t say it, but that was the reason. He would never speak ill of her. He would just—” He gestured vaguely. “Teach me things. Cook meals. Make sure I knew how to take care of myself in case he couldn’t.”

“He was preparing you.”

“For what?”

“For losing him,” Camille said quietly. “He was preparing you for the thing he couldn’t stop.”

Antoine looked at her. She saw something shift behind his eyes—a door opening wider than it had been before.

“He did that,” Antoine said. “In his way. He never said the words. But he left me notes sometimes. Little instructions. How to fix a door hinge. How to change a tire. How to make a proper tourtière.” He smiled, but it was thin. “He was a quiet man. He said more with recipes than he ever did with sentences.”

Camille picked up the wooden spoon and stirred the filling without thinking. The motion was soothing. Grounding.

“I’m afraid of failing,” she said.

The words came out before she could stop them. She froze, spoon in hand, staring at the mixture like it might offer her an escape.

Antoine didn’t laugh. Didn’t dismiss it. He just watched her.

“I’m thirty-four,” she said, forcing herself to continue. “I’ve spent fifteen years building a career as a translator. And it’s a good career. A respectable one. But I’m not the best. There are people better than me. Younger than me. And now my editor is asking for this book, this impossible deadline, and I said yes, because what else would I say? No? I couldn’t say no. If I fail at this, if I miss this deadline, I have nothing to show for all those years of work. Just a reputation for being reliable. And reliable is not remarkable.”

She set the spoon down. Her hands were trembling slightly. She pressed them flat against the counter.

“That’s what I’m afraid of,” she said. “That I’m not remarkable. That I’m just—fine.”

The kitchen was quiet. The pan had stopped sizzling. Antoine moved around the counter until he stood facing her, his shoulder against the cabinet.

“You know what my father was?” he asked.

She shook her head.

“He was a structural engineer. Worked for the same firm for thirty years. Never gave a presentation. Never wrote a book. Never made a single headline.” Antoine’s voice was soft. “He designed bridges that didn’t fall down. That’s it. That was his entire job. And I don’t think anyone ever called him remarkable.”

Camille looked up at him.

“But I’ve crossed those bridges,” Antoine said. “I’ve driven over them in the middle of winter, in storms that should have killed me, and they held. They held because he paid attention. Because he was meticulous. Because he was reliable.” He held her gaze. “There is nothing fine about that.”

Her throat tightened. She blinked rapidly.

“You’re more capable than you think, Camille,” he said. “You’re sitting in a stranger’s house in the middle of a Quebec winter, and you’re not just surviving—you’re working. You’re finishing a book. You’re learning to make a pie with a man you barely knew three weeks ago. That takes a kind of strength most people don’t have.”

She tried to speak, but the words wouldn’t come. She swallowed.

“The crust won’t roll itself,” she said finally, her voice rough.

He smiled—a real smile, warm and uncomplicated. “No. It won’t. But you’re faster than me with a rolling pin.”

She laughed, and the sound surprised her. It was watery and imperfect, but it was real.

They finished the pie together.

When they slid it into the wood stove to bake, Antoine set a timer on his watch. “One hour,” he said. “Then we eat.”

Camille looked at the oven door, at the heat shimmering behind the glass. Then she looked at Antoine—at his quiet confidence, at the careful way he had taught her to pinch the crust together.

“Thank you,” she said.

He didn’t ask what for. He just nodded.

They cleaned the kitchen in silence, side by side, and Camille felt something warm settle in her chest—something that had nothing to do with the stove. She had a deadline hanging over her head, a locket still missing, and an intruder out there somewhere in the snow. But in this moment, standing next to a man who had learned to cook from a father who taught him how to be alone, she felt remarkably close to something that felt like home.