Caleb had brought dinner.
Not from a restaurant, not ordered in, but made, which Fiona had not known he could do until the bag he set on her kitchen counter turned out to contain not containers but actual ingredients, the specific careful selection of someone who had looked up a recipe and then gone to a market rather than taking the easier path. She had watched him unpack it with a surprise she did not fully conceal and he had caught her expression and said simply that he had been cooking since university, that it was one of the things he did when he needed to think, and then he had put on her kitchen apron without ceremony and begun.
She had sat at the counter and watched him move around her small kitchen with the unhurried ease of someone who was comfortable in spaces that were not their own, and she had felt, underneath the warmth of it, the particular ache of a person receiving something generous while carrying something they had not confessed.
