Page 65 of His Daughter

"I want to tell you something," I said.

He squeezed my hand.

"The reason I was adopting." My voice was steady. The words were not easy. "My body can't… I have endometriosis. They caught it late. The damage was too extensive. I can't have children." I looked at the sidewalk — a crack in the concrete and a weed growing through it. "I spent years feeling like my body betrayed me. Like it wouldn't do the one thing it was built to do. Three rounds of IVF. None of them worked. And every time, I felt more broken than the time before."

The string lights above us swayed in a breeze. His hand tightened around mine.

"Your body didn't fail you." His voice was quiet. "It just made sure Lena found you instead."

I stopped walking. I looked at him. The streetlight caught his face — the strong jaw, the cleft chin, and the pale-blue eyes that were looking at me without pity.

"Thank you," I said quietly.

He brought my hand to his mouth, kissed my knuckles, and held it there.

"I want to tell you something too," he said against my skin. "Kira. The way it ended." He lowered my hand but didn't let go. "I told myself she left on my terms. That I was fine with it. That I saw it coming and managed the exit the way I manage everything." He was looking at the street, not at me. "That was a lie. She left me. I don’t know why. I never got closure, but she left."

He turned to me. "Now I'm standing on a sidewalk with a woman who terrifies me, and I don't want to manage the exit." He paused. "I've never said that before. To anyone."

I kissed him. His free hand came up to my jaw. I leaned into him, and the kiss was slow and warm. He sighed against my lips.

“I just love doing that, Ms. Calloway.”

My eyes met his from underneath my lashes. I grinned. “Me too, Mr. Hale.”

He led me to the car and drove for five minutes. I had no idea where we were going until he parked in front of a tiny building. “Let’s go.”

He opened the door for me and held my hand as we walked into a small kitchen above a wine shop, with copper pots hanging from a rack and a wooden table dusted with flour.

A woman in a white chef's coat and hat smiled at us from behind the table.

"Welcome. I’m Rosa, and I’ll be taking care of you tonight. We’ll be making tagliatelle." She set a mound of flour on the wooden board and cracked an egg into the center. "From scratch."

Declan rolled his sleeves. I tied an apron. Rosa demonstrated the well in the flour, the eggs folded in, the slow incorporation with a fork, and then the hands. The dough came together under her fingers in thirty seconds. She made it look effortless.

My dough did not come together in thirty seconds. My dough stuck to my fingers, to the board, to the front of my apron. I added more and more flour, and the dough went dry and cracked.

"Less flour," Rosa said gently. "Feel it. It should be like the skin on the inside of your arm." She touched my forearm. "Soft. Smooth. Not stiff."

Declan's dough was worse. He was seasoning it before it was formed, adding salt and pepper to raw flour, as if he were preparing a salad.

"That's not…you don't season the dough," I said.

"Why not? Everything needs seasoning."

Rosa looked at his dough, then at him. "Maybe less of that." She gestured at the monstrosity he was working on.

I laughed. He looked at me, and his eyes crinkled, and a smear of flour was on his jaw. We rolled the pasta. Our elbows bumped at the narrow board. I nudged him left. He nudged me back. My sheet was uneven — thick on one end, translucent on the other. His was rectangular, which Rosa said was not possible with a round rolling pin, and yet.

"Your pasta is a trapezoid," I said.

"It's avant-garde."

He reached for the garlic. I intercepted. "I'm handling the garlic."

"Ha! So you can burn it? I think not."

"I'm not going to burn it."