After Hours is a romance column: sensual, non-explicit fiction for grown-up readers. All characters are invented adults; any resemblance to real persons is coincidental.
Vera and Thomas, part four.
Vera had not cooked for another person in four years, and on Thursday afternoon she discovered that her apartment in Murray Hill owned exactly one serving platter, which was chipped, and two wooden spoons, one of which had been used for many years to stir wheat-starch paste and was therefore disqualified. She went out at four o’clock and bought a third spoon, a bunch of thyme, and a lemon she did not strictly need, because a lemon on a counter looks like a person who knows what she is doing.
The menu was her grandmother’s: a chicken braised slowly with leeks and mustard, potatoes roasted until they gave up, and an apple cake from a recipe card written in Swedish pencil, the instructions so terse they read like a dare. By six the apartment smelled the way her grandmother’s kitchen in Uppsala had smelled every Sunday of her childhood, and Vera, standing at the stove in her stocking feet, felt for the first time that week entirely calm.
He buzzed at seven exactly. She had expected that of a structural engineer and was pleased to be right.
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