Wren
Here is a thing I had forgotten about myself: I love to cook.
I didn't lose it all at once. That's not how Kellan worked. It went in small cuts. A glance at my plate here, a joke about my portions there, a "are you sure you want seconds" delivered with a smile so mild you'd feel crazy for bleeding from it. Somewhere in two years, food stopped being joy and became arithmetic, and the kitchen, which had been my mother's favorite room and then mine, became a place I performed in for a judge.
Berta fixed it without knowing she was doing it. She fixed it by taking one afternoon off.
It was her sister's nameday in the village, and she left at noon with threats about her covered dishes, and by three o'clock I had wandered into that huge, warm, copper-hung kitchen the way you wander into
