She said it on a Tuesday in February, without planning to.
They had been at the kitchen table for an hour -- her prepping a Valentine's order, him doing something on his phone that he'd abandoned halfway through in favor of watching her work, which he did with the unselfconscious attention of a man who had given up pretending he wasn't doing it.
She was piping rosettes onto petit fours and thinking about nothing in particular when she heard herself say it.
"I love you. Very matter-of-fact. Like a thing she was noting rather than announcing."
Her hands kept moving. The rosette she was piping stayed even.
The room was very quiet.
She looked up. He had put his phone down and he was watching her with an expression she had not seen before -- not the almost-smile, not the guarded assessmen
