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“How much cinnamon?”

“A teaspoon.”

He measures a level teaspoon and studies it. “That’s not enough.”

“It’s what the recipe says.”

“The recipe’s wrong.” He says it kindly. “It doesn’t feel like enough.”

Every ordered cell in my body wants to hold the line at one teaspoon. I look at the recipe. I look at him.

“Add a little more,” I say.

He beams and doubles it.

We’re making a Thanksgiving pie, Bo and I, at my kitchen counter, because Dottie had a thing with her friends this afternoon and Luke’s on shift. When Dottie asked if I could keep him I said yes before she finished the sentence.

It’s been a month since the first real date.

A month ago my refrigerator was bare. This morning there’s a drawing on it, four people in a row, one of them with long yellow hair Bo confirmed was me.

I keep waiting for all of it to start feeling like too much. It never does.

I make a good pie. The kind with a hand-cut leaf border, each leaf scored with a paring knife and laid so the seams don’t show. It photographs well.

But we are not making that pie today.

Bo crimps the crust himself, which is why the edge looks less like a border and more like a small weather event. Then he starts on the leaves, cutting them out of the scraps freehand, no cutter, tongue between his teeth, laying them across the top in a pattern I can only describe as…no pattern. Some overlap. One goes on flat, upside down.

“That one’s sleeping,” he says. “It’s tired.”

“Of course it is.”

My hand is already moving toward it, just to turn it over. Just to fix the two beside it, which are crowding.

Bo looks up. He doesn’t say anything. He looks at my hand, then at me, one eyebrow doing a very Luke thing.

I put my hand back at my side.

“I wasn’t going to,” I say.

“Yes you were.”

He goes back to it. A leaf slides off the edge of the counter and lands on the kitchen floor, and before I can reach it he scoops it up, brushes it once against his shirt, and sets it right on top of the pie with the others.

Somewhere inside me, every hygiene-related value I own packs a bag and leaves. I say nothing. This is, I’m learning, a large part of what loving Bo is going to require.

He steps back, flour up both arms and somehow in his hair, and considers our pie the way you’d consider a painting you’re deciding whether to buy.

“It’s the prettiest pie I’ve ever seen,” he says.

It is not pretty. It is lopsided, over-cinnamoned, sealed with a floor leaf, and structurally unsound. On every objective scale I own, it is the ugliest pie I have seen in my life.

I’ve decided the scale is wrong.

Because I’m going to remember this. The eggshell he never mentioned. The cinnamon he was right about. The tired leaf. His tongue between his teeth. I’ll remember it long after I’ve forgotten every flawless pie I ever made for Thanksgiving.

Pretty will never measure up to today.