Chapter 6
Ren didn’t tell Damon about the call. She didn’t need to. The shape of what was happening was already visible in the tightness around his eyes each time he came out of a meeting. In the calls that ran later into the night. In the careful, exhausted way he thanked her for dinner without quite meeting her eyes anymore — as though looking at her too directly might cost him something he couldn’t afford to lose right now.
She wrote her resignation letter on a Thursday night, sitting at the kitchen island with the mason jar of recipe cards visible on the shelf across the room. A reminder of exactly what she was about to walk away from.
The letter took her an hour. She rewrote it four times. Each version sounded either too clinical or too revealing. She finally settled on something short and professional. Due to personal circumstances, I must resign my position effective — She left the date blank. She didn’t know when she would actually be able to leave. She didn’t know if she would be able to leave at all.
She didn’t sleep that night. She sat at the kitchen island until the sky began to lighten over the Atlantic, watching the gray turn to gold, thinking about a house that had been empty for so long it had forgotten how to hold warmth. Thinking about whether she had the right to be the one to fill it.
She was still sitting there when Damon came down at six, dressed for his run. He stopped in the kitchen doorway. Looked at the letter on the counter. Looked at her face.
“No.”
” You haven’t even read it.”
“I don’t need to.” He walked into the kitchen, picked up the letter, and read it anyway. Then he set it down carefully, the way you’d set down something that might break if you handled it wrong. “Camille Voss called you.”
“It doesn’t matter who called me.”
“It matters to me.”
” Damon.” Ren stood up, her hands pressed flat against the counter. “She’s right. I’m not part of your world. I’m a chef. I cook food. I don’t know how to navigate boardrooms or funding votes or — ”
“You don’t need to navigate any of that. You need to stay.”
“I can’t be the reason you lose this project.”
“You won’t be.”
“You don’t know that.”
“I know that I have spent my entire adult life building things for other people because it was safer than building anything for myself.” He stepped closer. His voice was low, but it wasn’t steady. “I know that you are the first person in nineteen years who made me want to try. And I know that if you leave, I will finish this project. I will go to the meetings. I will shake the hands. I will do everything I’m supposed to do. And then I will come home to an empty house with a mason jar on the shelf and no one to cook for.”
Ren’s throat tightened. “I don’t want to cost you everything.”
“You won’t. But you might cost me you. And I’ve only just found you.”
The silence that followed was not empty. It was filled with everything they hadn’t said yet, everything they had been too careful to name, pressing against the walls of the kitchen like a tide that had finally worn through the barrier.
“Damon — ”
“I’ve wanted you for months,” he said.
The words landed between them, raw and unguarded and entirely uncalculated.
“From the night you put your cardigan on me. Maybe before that. Maybe from the first time you left food on my desk and didn’t wait for thanks. I’ve wanted you for months, and I didn’t say anything because I didn’t think I deserved to want anything. I still don’t know if I do. But I know that I cannot watch you walk out of this house because of something someone else said about what I should or shouldn’t be allowed to have.”
Ren’s hands were shaking. She pressed them against her thighs to still them.
“What about the project?”
“I’ll handle the project.”
“Camille Voss — ”
“Will be dealt with.”
“How?”
A ghost of a smile crossed his face. “I’ve spent eleven years watching her watch me. I know where her weak points are. I’ve simply never had a reason to use them before.”
“You’re going to fight her.”
“I’m going to protect what’s mine.” He held her gaze. “And I’m asking you to let me.”
Ren stood motionless, the resignation letter between them on the counter, the mason jar watching from the shelf. She thought about the empty frames. The cardigan folded outside her door. The photograph in the dining room. The way his hands had held hers on the kitchen floor, steady and sure, counting breaths until she could breathe on her own again.
She reached for the letter. She tore it in half. Then she tore it again, and let the pieces fall into the trash.
“Don’t lose the project,” she said.
“I won’t.”
“And don’t you ever say you don’t deserve to want anything. Not to me.”
Damon looked at her for a long moment. Then he crossed the remaining distance between them, slowly enough that she could have stepped away if she wanted to. She didn’t.
He cupped her face in his hands, his thumbs brushing her cheekbones, and kissed her.
It was not a gentle kiss. It was the kind of kiss a man gives when he has been holding something back for months and has finally, completely, stopped. Ren’s hands found the fabric of his shirt, fisting in it, pulling him closer. The counter pressed into her lower back. The morning light poured through the window, turning the kitchen gold.
When they finally broke apart, Damon rested his forehead against hers.
“I don’t know how to do this,” he admitted. “I don’t know how to be someone’s — ”
“Neither do I,” Ren said. “We’ll figure it out.”
May you like
He kissed her again. Softer this time. A promise.
And when he finally pulled away to go make the calls that would save his project, Ren picked up the mason jar from the shelf, pulled out the card labeled For bad days, and started making her mother’s honey cake. Because some things were worth celebrating. Even if the celebration came before the battle was won.
