The Secret Ingredient

by KD Fisher

  “Sweep me off my feet, why don’t you?”

  Then she did. Beth draped her body over mine and poured every last ounce of joy into me until I was so full up, I thought I might burst. We tangled together again, fingers and tongues and shared breath. Until a realization made me freeze up cold.

  “Crap. What time is it?” I glanced around the room for an alarm clock. Judging by the long shadows and soft, golden light it was already mid-afternoon. When I’d walked out of Bella Vista this morning, one of the first things I’d done was text Vanessa that I would pick Pete up from school and that he wouldn’t be going to his extended day program as usual. It had been an extra boost to know that, at least for a few days or weeks, I would be the one to walk my son home from school. That I would be the one there for him for the first time in a long time.

  Beth didn’t miss a beat, reaching quickly for her phone and letting me know that thankfully it was only quarter past two. I slipped out of the warm confines of Beth’s soft sheets and heavy quilt and into the cool air. My skin pricked with goose bumps immediately as I searched the hardwood floors for my sports bra and briefs. Finally, I found them next to the nightstand and tugged them on. Now to find my dang socks.

  “Hey, is everything alright?” Beth sounded worried enough that I froze with my jeans halfway up my thighs.

  “Oh shoot. Sorry. Yeah, I forgot I said I’d pick Pete up today is all.” I smoothed away the little worried wrinkle between her eyebrows. “You want to come with me? If you don’t need to head back into work maybe we could make dinner together?”

  Again, the knowledge that I could have everything I’d wanted dang near almost knocked me over. When I’d been back in Missouri, scared and sad and lying in bed trying to picture my future, it had been nothing more than a gray blank. Now it was all the colors at once, so bright I almost wanted to look away. But I didn’t.

  Beth slipped out of bed and twined her arms around my neck, pulling my lips down to meet hers. “Do you and Pete want to come back over here for dinner? I have some lamb shanks in the freezer and a whole bunch of board games my mom gave me for some random reason. We could braise the lamb and serve them up over some mashed parsnips. Oh, and I have some really good purple carrots I bet Pete would love. It’s freezing out so dinner and game night in front of the fire might be fun.”

  I was torn between joy at the sheer, easy domesticity of this conversation and wanting to argue that we should slow roast the lamb shanks in the oven with rosemary and lemon and pair them with a rice pilaf and a microgreen salad. The joy won out.

  As the two of us stepped out into the sharp wind of the coming winter, I was sure for the first time that I’d found where I belonged.

  Epilogue

  Adah

  6 months later

  “Mom, the tape got all messed up again.” Pete held up the dispenser to show me that the clear packing tape had indeed escaped from the two plastic prongs meant to keep it from sticking to itself.

  “Here, hon, I got it,” Vanessa shouted over the sound of Elvis crooning from the small portable speaker she’d brought up to make packing more pleasant and plucked the tape gun from his hand. Problem quickly solved, she got back to labeling boxes.

  The apartment, our home for the last year, was all packed up and scrubbed within an inch of its life. I glanced at the door frame where I’d measured Pete’s height. Over the past few months, he’d shot up like a weed in the springtime from a hair under four feet to almost four foot five. I was a little taller than average and Jeremy had been a downright beanpole. Beth liked to joke that Pete would probably be taller than her by the time he finished fourth grade. My eyes flicked to the painting, neatly wrapped in brown paper and moving blankets, propped against the opposite wall. I’d gotten home from work a few weeks ago to find it plopped on my porch with a note taped to the brown paper wrapping. In Beth’s swooping cursive, it read simply, Move in with me.

  If I’d thought I was choked up as I lifted the package to bring it inside, it was nothing compared to the ball of heat that lodged in my throat the moment I peeled away the paper. On the canvas Pete and I lay fast asleep in the meadow behind The Yellow House. We’d walked around the woods on the first warm spring day. Pete had chatted away about his new gym teacher and new friends and pointed out the plants Andrew had been teaching him to identify. We sat down to eat the sandwiches I’d packed up for us and must have both dozed off because when Beth found us, the shadows were long and she laughed as she showed us a picture she’d snapped of the two of us on her phone. I hadn’t known, though, that she would turn the image into something so beautiful. Crocuses and snowdrops bloomed around us, painted in Beth’s hazy, dreamy style. Pete’s honey brown hair, a few shades darker than my own now since it seemed to darken as he got older, lay in a halo around his head. My arm was thrown over my eyes and my lips were parted. I looked free. Seeing myself through Beth’s eyes, I saw the version of myself I’d always hoped I’d get to become.

  “Sorry to see you two go. The new guy seems nice enough, but I sorta doubt he’ll turn into the son I never had though.” Vanessa sighed, putting a gentle hand on my shoulder. Her touch was a soothing anchor. I met her eye and had to press my lips together to keep from blubbering all over her. I’d already admitted she was like a mother to me and we’d spent a tearful night talking at my kitchen table. My sessions with Linda were helping me with the whole talking thing, but I still couldn’t say I loved it.

  “You’ll see me tomorrow,” I laughed and turned back to pulling black garbage bags over our winter coats on hangers.

  “Can we go up to the beach next week?” Pete called from his bedroom, where he was no doubt avoiding taping up the boxes, a task he’d been gung ho about for all of two minutes.

  “If you all aren’t too busy. I thought I could barely keep up with your schedule before. Now it’s soccer camp this, bank meetings that, and all the hullabaloo at the restaurant.” Vanessa batted at the air and shook her head.

  “We can go on Monday if the weather’s good. Now for the love of all things holy, can y’all let me finish up. Beth’s gonna be here in a few minutes.”

  A sharp rap on the kitchen door announced that a few minutes was, in fact, now. I flopped the coats down on the counter and jogged over to let Beth in. My heart still fluttered every time I saw her. Even after all this time I couldn’t believe she was mine. She waved through the window, bouncing with excitement. Her hair was clipped back, the early morning sun catching the golden threads twisting through the copper. She wore a totally moving-day-impractical outfit of a flowy patchwork tank top and very tiny jean cutoff shorts. The sight of all that freckled skin made me wish I could pull her away for a few minutes and replay the mind-numbing sex we’d had out in the stone barn the night before after everyone else had gone home for the night. With the moonlight bathing her skin she’d glowed... Nope. Focus. Moving.

  Beth brushed her lips against mine the moment I pulled open the door, the pastry box she was holding jabbing me in the ribs. But I didn’t care. I didn’t like anything better than the feel of her kiss.

  “Oh I see how it is. It’s all fine and good for your girlfriend to distract you. God forbid me and your son say anything though,” Vanessa chided, her voice brimming with laughter.

  “Well I come bearing gifts.” Beth set the pastry box next to the sink. Whatever was inside smelled fantastic, all warm fruit and rich vanilla. She flipped the lid open to reveal a half dozen gorgeous muffins. “Strawberry rhubarb. My girl’s favorite.” Her fingers sifted through my hair, tugging just enough to send a hot twist of lust into my belly.

  “Ew, you guys are being gross again.” Pete rolled his eyes as he swiped a muffin out of the box. He’d given Beth and I a stern talking-to about being too “mushy,” informing us that we were especially bad when we cooked together. Beth ruffled his hair and he only half-heartedly shrugged off her touch. She was great with him, surprisingly p
atient at talking through his steadily growing tweenage moodiness.

  “Well I have Andrew’s truck outside. I think we might be able to get everything in two trips. How come you two have, like, no stuff?”

  I’d gotten rid of a lot of my ragtag secondhand furniture once I’d agreed that Pete and I would move into Beth’s cottage at the end of the month. Where pretty much everything I’d brought with me was meaningless junk rescued from other people’s lives, every item in Beth’s house had meaning. There was the rough-hewn farmhouse table her brother had made for her with the intricate wicker pendant light woven by a friend hanging over it. There were the tapestries collected from places I’d never even heard of. Plants lovingly propagated from cuttings from her mom’s garden (a place so lush and colorful I could have sworn it came right out of a storybook). Even the quilt on her bed, a gift from an Amish family she’d worked a farm internship with, had a story. My bedding was all big-box store clearance stuff I’d accumulated over the years.

  So when it came time to pack up, really all we had was some kitchen stuff, my tiny collection of clothes, and Pete’s ever growing piles of sports gear, Legos, and comic books. It turned out, once we’d made a handful of trips up and down the sun-bleached wooden stairs to the sidewalk, we wouldn’t even need to make two trips. Pete would have to ride with a canvas grocery bag of spices in his lap, but he didn’t seem to mind. He was as eager to move into Beth’s place as I was. One, because Hamlet was now officially Pete’s best friend, and two, because he and his new friend Samina were convinced the woods outside Beth’s cottage were teeming with real live fairies.

  Vanessa hugged all three of us like we were headed off to war, when in reality she would see us the very next morning. She’d saved all of our hides when she’d agreed to start doing the bookkeeping for The Yellow House a few days a week.

  My body felt lighter as Pete, Beth, and I piled into the truck and headed out of town. Downtown South Bay was a mess of slow-moving tourists, pedicabs, and street trolleys that stopped every block or so to highlight various historic landmarks. It took a solid ten minutes to move two blocks, but none of us seemed to mind. Beth turned up the volume on a playlist Pete loved and rolled down the windows. The air was warm, still not quite hot yet, with a nice salt breeze blowing in off the water. We drove past Bella Vista, now renamed Portside Grill and serving mostly wraps and overpriced salads. Pete and Beth both stuck their tongues out and booed. But I only shook my head and laughed. I was glad to be where I was. Leaving that place was the third best thing that had ever happened to me. The first and second were in the backseat howling along with an awful pop song and in the driver’s seat conducting a drum solo against the steering wheel.

  We pulled onto the coastal highway, headed north to Port Catherine. The traffic was light and I grinned to myself as we flew past glittering water, tiny islands dotting the shore, and sailboats bobbing with the waves. I wasn’t really sure if I’d ever known what relaxation felt like until I let Beth fully into my life. But I felt it now.

  “I’m so excited for you guys to move in!” Beth shouted over the wind and music. Her eyes flicked from me to the rearview mirror.

  “Oh my gosh, you need to cool it.” Pete sighed. “We already stayed with you for like three weeks once school got out.”

  I turned around to pin my son with a raised eyebrow for his snarky tone. He sighed again and admitted that he was excited too.

  The sign for Port Catherine’s exit flashed by and I turned to look at Beth. “Honey, you missed it.” Beth was a good driver but sometimes she got too caught up in dramatic singalongs or winding stories and forgot where she was going.

  “I know. I’m getting off at 7A. I want to stop by the restaurant if that’s cool with you? Apparently Eitan has some fancy-pants update to the reservation system he made and wants me to take a look at it. I tried to do it from home this morning but, honestly, I don’t think I should ever be trusted with a computer again. And I figured you might want to check in with Andrew about the inspection.”

  The truck’s tires crunched over the gravel of The Yellow House’s newly expanded parking lot. We weren’t set to fully open the new dining room until August and the inn wouldn’t be dried-in until at least October, but the place still looked completely different than the first time I’d seen it a little over a year ago. The yellow cottage was exactly the same, down to the window boxes bursting with herbs and smoke pouring from the stone chimney. But now, where there had once been a few picnic tables haphazardly clustered under café lights, Andrew had built a beautiful stone patio surrounded by garden beds and dotted with tables. On one end he’d even installed a second fireplace and some benches where folks waiting for a table could enjoy drinks and snacks.

  I almost wanted to pinch myself. It was so wild that this was my restaurant now, too. After I’d started as the head cook (it felt nice to shake off the stupid kitchen hierarchy labels I’d spent so much time caring about) I’d invested in The Yellow House’s expansion with some of the money I’d saved. Beth had insisted on making us partners in the business. So now I was designing the menu and cooking at one of the best restaurants in the country, which I also happened to co-own.

  A chicken pecking at the ground next to my boot startled me out of my thoughts and I looked up to find Andrew jogging over, wide grin on his face. Getting to know Beth’s family had been an unexpected joy. I’d never met a family like theirs before. Robin, Beth’s mom, was warm and loving and a little overbearing, but in a way that felt good. She did things like buy Pete new sneakers and show up on a random Tuesday night with enough frozen lasagna and chicken noodle soup to last us through two winters. And Beth’s dad was so unlike the reverend I had a hard time even believing they belonged in the same category. Where the reverend had been hard and serious, John was goofy and soft. Pete adored going out in the boat with him and always came back from their outings with outlandish stories and tons of really bad jokes. But I had to admit Andrew was my favorite. The first few times I’d met him, I really hadn’t liked him. He was big and traditionally handsome with the energy of an excited puppy. But his passion for growing had been an unexpected gift to the business. The expanded Yellow House farm CSA had helped us pull in money through the spring and he never stopped coming up with creative solutions to the litany of daily problems we ran into. Plus my son idolized him. The minute Andrew showed up, he and Pete were doing some kind of complicated handshake and talking a mile a minute about a baseball game they’d gone to a few nights earlier.

  “Hey!” Grace shouted, poking her head out the kitchen window. Her glossy black hair was tied back with a white bandanna printed all over with smiling cartoon oranges. She was adorable and a total machine in the kitchen. “I was just gonna text you to see if you wanted me to bring anything over. I bet you’re hungry from the move!” Grace was basically a human exclamation point, every word out of her mouth zinging with energy. She was a joy to work with, too, creative and easygoing. Her background cooking Korean food at home and making gourmet cupcakes at a fancy bakery in New York came together to create a pastry program I knew even Jay was jealous of. Not that they had much to complain about now that they were in the process of opening their own coffee shop and bakery in South Bay.

  “We’re good, thanks. Beth brought over some muffins and I know Robin probably put about four casseroles in the fridge at home,” I called back. “But let’s talk tomorrow about what we want to do for the Solstice Barbecue.”

  With a double thumbs-up and a big grin Grace popped back into the cottage.

  I tipped my head back to let the warm summer sun sink into my skin. In the distance the sound of Ahmed navigating phone reservations twisted together with the low rumble of Eitan’s voice. Pete and Andrew’s conversation had shifted to a heated discussion of the best way to build a fairy house. Chickadees called to each other in the woods as the wind carried the scent of fresh earth and pine. Then Beth was next to me, her fingers
lacing with mine. She pressed a quick kiss to the corner of my mouth, then grinned. I breathed in deep, rooted firmly in my place. The air smelled like home.

  * * *

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  Acknowledgements

  Thank you to the wonderful team at Carina Press and to my amazing agent Claire Draper for taking a chance on me and on this story. Also a huge thank-you to Rebecca and M.A. for their thoughtful beta feedback. I am forever grateful to my readers! I hope you enjoyed Adah and Beth’s story. Finally, I’m so thankful for my community: my wonderful friends in Maine and all over the country, my loving family, and to my encouraging and very patient partner.

  What happens when the search for the perfect date goes perfectly wrong?

  Don’t miss The Love Study, a charming romantic comedy from critically acclaimed author Kris Ripper, out October 2020 from Carina Adores!

  Chapter One

  Here’s how my friends describe me to new people: “This is Declan. He left his last boyfriend at the altar, so watch out.”

  It’s mostly a joke. Mostly. Not that I left my last boyfriend at the altar—that part’s definitely true. But watch out is just a playful warning. Besides, I swore off romance after that. No one really has to watch out for me.

  It was ages ago. The leaving-Mason-at-the-altar thing. The swearing-off-romance thing is ongoing. Though I guess “This is Declan. He swore off romance, so watch out” has less of a ring to it.