He had made pasta.
Not the same pasta as her kitchen, not the weeknight pasta of a tired parent with a four-year-old and thirty minutes and a bag of spinach — proper pasta, the kind that involved a pan of sauce that had been going for a while, the smell of it reaching the hallway before she knocked. The apartment was the Gray Zone rental he kept for his NYC trips, a one-bedroom with good light and no pack marks on the walls, which she had always found appropriate. He decorated in the neutral style of someone who moved often and had stopped trying to make temporary places permanent.
"You didn't have to cook," she said, coming in.
"I know." He took her jacket. "That's why I did."
She sat at the table he had set for two, in the apartment that smelled like the sauce and like the specific q
