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A few minutes later, as she dices the potatoes and adds them to a pan with water, she asks, “So why the interest in food waste?”
“It was a source sited by a grant applicant.”
“And you …” She makes a tell-me-more gesture. “What? Just read grant applications in your spare time?”
“Actually, I read grant applications for my full-time job, now.”
“So you’re not just an eccentric, retired, billionaire entrepreneur?”
“Alas, not even a billionaire.”
The noise she makes—halfway between a snort and scoff—says she doesn’t believe me. I don’t argue with her. After all, I’m plenty rich, even if my charitable donations keep me out of the billionaire club.
We keep chatting like this while she cooks. Eventually, she teases me into admitting how bored I was after I sold Cookie Jar. I didn’t want to run the company anymore, but I didn’t want to just do nothing. Eventually, a friend of a friend put me in contact with a non-profit that needed help reviewing grant proposals.
“What kind of grant proposals? Like, venture capital? What you’d see on Shark Tank?”
“No. Mostly for research grants.”
She pauses while mincing garlic. “Like scientific research.”
“Yes.”
“And you just have a broad enough base of knowledge to review those?”
I shrug, remembering how annoyed Ava would get by all the reading I do. “I’m smart enough I can figure it out. I research anything I don’t understand. And I’m only one person on a committee. If there’s something I don’t understand, I have backup.”
Not that it’s ever come to that.
Even though my background is in programing and finance, there’s not much I can’t learn if I put my mind to it.
She turns back to the oven, sautéing the spinach in silence for several moments. “So you’re like, a legit genius then?”
What’s the right answer here?
Ava hated how smart I was. Called me a snotty know-it-all.
Honestly, she’s probably not wrong.
But I refuse to glorify ignorance. There’s nothing sexy about stupidity.
And … fuck … it’s not like it matters one way or the other if Savannah thinks I’m a know-it-all.
Because that’s not what this is about. And what are we? Ten?
I huff out a breath, annoyed with myself for even hesitating to answer.
“Yeah. I guess I am.”
I wait for some reaction from her. Some sign that she finds my overt nerdiness off-putting, but she says nothing.
I go back to my reading, not looking up again until I hear a pop followed by a sharp intake of breath.
I look up to see her standing on one foot, still facing the stove, rubbing the top of one foot against the denim covering her other calf.
“What happened?” I’m already on my feet and rounding the island.
“Nothing. Just splattered some grease.”
