Chapter Twenty-Eight

RACHEL DIDN’T SLAM the door in his face, so Alex must have guessed correctly about her intentions. She walked through her house ahead of him, flipping on lights, until she reached the kitchen.

“Coffee?”

“Uh, sure. Thanks.”

She scooped beans into the grinder and began the process of making their coffee. “You should have met my mom. She was one of the strongest, most determined women I’ve ever known.”

“Was? Did she pass away?”

A pained expression crossed Rachel’s face. “In a manner of speaking, I suppose. She used to be a nurse. After my dad left us, she worked crazy hours to support us. But somehow she still managed to get most Sundays off to spend time with me. She talked about getting her degree as a nurse-practitioner so she could work normal hours in a clinic instead of in the hospital.”

Alex pulled out a chair and seated himself, careful not to disrupt the flow of words. Right now, it felt like she was talking to herself as much as to him.

“I had no idea how good I had it. I was really young when my dad left, so I don’t remember the times he was drunk and unemployed, how often my mom picked up extra shifts to pay the bills and the babysitter when he was incapable of watching me. I only knew that all my friends had dads and I didn’t.” She grimaced. “I thought I deserved one. So I started praying every night that God would bring me a father. The faith of a kid, you know?”

“You did deserve a father,” Alex said. “But sometimes we don’t exactly get the ones we hoped for.”

“You have no idea how true that is.” She poured coffee from the French press into two mugs. “Cream or sugar?”

“Both, please.”

She mixed their coffees, then brought them to the table before picking up where she had left off. “I was eleven when Mom met Dale. He was perfect, at least to me. He had a good job; he wanted kids with his ex-wife but they weren’t able to have them; he was a Christian. Immediately, I thought he was the answer to my prayers. I don’t know if my mom had doubts and ignored them because I liked him so much or if he had her fooled too. But it didn’t last long. We saw the truth pretty soon after the wedding.”

Alex flinched inwardly, already anticipating where the story was going. But he only nodded and sipped his coffee.

“That warm, loving man disappeared and was replaced by a critical, harsh dictator. The house was too messy. My mom didn’t cook enough. She worked too much, which obviously meant her priorities were out of order. Our church was far too liberal —because girls could wear pants and they allowed secular movies and music. Gradually, he managed to change everything about us. We left our church for his. My mom cut back on her hours at work and eventually quit. I started picking up the cooking duties, something he actually appreciated because it meant I would ‘make a good wife someday.’” Rachel enclosed the last part in air quotes. “My wardrobe had to be approved by him every morning. If my skirts and tops were too tight, he’d call me a slut. If I wore shapeless, baggy things, he’d tell me I needed to try harder to look feminine or no guy would ever be interested in me. One time he said I didn’t wear makeup because I was a lesbian and an abomination before the Lord. I cried for hours, and when I finally apologized —for what, I have no idea —he blamed me for making him feel bad.”

Alex listened to the litany with revulsion. He’d come across domestic abuse situations like this while in his grad program, but knowing Rachel had lived through it made him physically ill. “How did you and your mom deal with that?”

“Mom completely changed. She turned from this strong, capable woman into someone who only existed to serve him. I don’t know if she went along with it because she truly loved him or if she just was doing her Christian duty to obey him. But I could see the change in her. It was like a light got dimmer each day. She begged me to do what he said, defended his behavior as work stress. I think he blamed her when I didn’t do what he wanted because I was her daughter.

“For a while, I toed the line, but I figured out fast that even if I did everything right, he’d invent reasons to punish me. So I rebelled. I cut class. Dyed my hair. Smoked in the woods behind the school. I figured if I’d be punished, it might as well be for something I actually did.”

“And that didn’t go over well, I imagine.”

She gave a humorless laugh. “Not at all. Finally, when I was fifteen and the school had called to say I was absent for the third time that month, he confronted me. Said if I wouldn’t follow his rules, I couldn’t stay under his roof. I figured I’d call his bluff, thought my mom would step in. But she didn’t. She helped me pack my bag.”

Rachel’s voice broke on the last word. Alex reached for her hand, but she pulled it away. “Before you say it, I know all about Battered Woman Syndrome and PTSD. And I know she was doing the only thing she could to get me out of there. But that’s when I realized the person I’d known was dead. And I swore that I would never let a man do that to me. I would never let someone erase who I really was.”

And there it was, whether Rachel realized it or not: the whole root of her reluctance with him, her workaholism, even the neat-freak perfectionism she probably didn’t realize she possessed. The psychologist in him strained to point it out; his sense of self-preservation stopped him in time. Instead he asked, “Where did you go?”

Another smile, but at least this one held some humor. “Where any fifteen-year-old leaving home goes, of course. To see her stepfather’s ex-wife.”

“Ouch. I’m sure that was a surprise.”

“Oddly enough, Louise knew who I was. She wasn’t even that hard to track down; she owned a little Italian restaurant in Hartford. Anyway, before I even got out my full name, she took one look at me and knew. She asked if I needed a place to stay, and that was that.”

“Your mom and Dale were okay with that?”

“Apparently. She went away and made a phone call. When she came back, she was furious, but she said there would be emancipation paperwork coming in the mail. This woman didn’t even know me, but she took me in. A bond of shared trauma, I guess.”

“So that’s how you got your start in the kitchen.”

Rachel nodded. “She gave me the choice of going back to school or getting my GED and going to work in the restaurant. I chose the latter. I worked as a food runner until I turned sixteen, which was when I was legally allowed to do kitchen work. It was like I was made to do it. I picked up everything they taught me, easily. The staff became like family and Louise became my mentor. By the time I was eighteen, I was running the kitchen. True, it was a hole-in-the-wall in Hartford, but it was mine and I loved it.

“And then one day, Louise handed me a bus ticket to Manhattan and a list of restaurants. ‘Start at the top and work your way down until you find someone to take you on,’ she said. I didn’t realize until later that the list was copied straight out of the new Michelin Guide. It started with Alain Ducasse at the Essex House and ended with Café Boulud.”

Alex smiled. He might not be a foodie, but he understood the significance of the two restaurants she’d just mentioned, how that list had expressed Louise’s hopes for her.

“It was hard. You have no idea how hard it was. I was sure that Louise had made a mistake sending me there. I thought about quitting so many times.”

“So why didn’t you?” Alex asked softly.

Rachel rose from the table and returned with the green journal in hand. Slowly, she pushed it across the table to him.

He took the notebook gingerly and flipped open the cover, not knowing what was inside but understanding what a gesture of trust this was. “What is this?”

“It was my mom’s once. Her ‘book of gratefuls,’ she called it. She had a series of them over the years, always carried one in her purse. And every time something good happened, whether it was finding a parking meter with time left on it or a sunny day in January, she’d write it down. She said whenever things looked bleak and she was tempted to think God had abandoned her, she could look back and see all the blessings He had given her.

“It was years before I could even open it. I hadn’t known she’d kept going after she married Dale, so this felt like a relic of the mom I’d lost. But when I was about to leave for New York, I forced myself to look. And I saw this.”

She flipped past the first few pages and pointed to an entry toward the bottom. He would have instantly recognized that the writing didn’t belong to Rachel, even if the date didn’t read fifteen years ago, nearly to the day.

July 18. Rachel is leaving this house. If she leaves now, she will never make the same mistakes I did.

Alex jerked his gaze up in time to see Rachel wiping her eyes. “It took a long time for me to get up the courage to write my own, but seeing that I was doing what my mom wanted for me kept me going through a lot of hard years. I was determined to make it on my own, determined to be independent enough that I never found myself trapped like she did. I got the reading lists for NYU freshmen and read along. I bought used culinary texts from CIA graduates. It wasn’t until I got the opportunity here in Denver that I realized I actually had a lot to be grateful for.”

“After the Harlem Ladies’ Bible Study?” he guessed.

She smiled. “Exactly.”

He skimmed the entries that began on the next page in Rachel’s now-familiar handwriting. They weren’t all ebullient messages of thankfulness —he could clearly see times when she struggled to find anything to be grateful for, even as recently as last month. And then he got to the final entry, which nearly made his heart stop.

Alex.

He stared at his name for a long moment, the word taking his breath like a full-body slam. Before he could think of what to say, she yanked the book from his hand and snapped it shut.

“You wanted to know about me. There it is.”

“Rachel —”

“Kind of sad, actually. My life is about food and whatever I can think to write about in this book.”

“Rachel, stop.” He captured her hand beneath his on the table. “Thank you for showing this to me. And telling me about everything.”

She stood and retrieved the coffee press from the kitchen, refilled their mugs with what was left. “You’re welcome. It’s not a big deal. I’m sorry if I made you think it was this huge revelation.”

“It’s a big deal to you or you wouldn’t keep it secret. I know that isn’t easy for you.”

She shrugged and tried to move away, but he caught her by the waist and turned her so they were face-to-face. “I need to tell you something.”

“Nothing good ever begins with that statement.”

“Has anyone ever told you that you can be a pessimist?”

“Not a pessimist. A realist.”

“Okay, then let’s get real.” He waited until she met his eyes. “I would never ask you to give up your dreams for me.”

“Alex —”

“I’m not kidding. Your stepfather felt threatened by your mother’s independence and manipulated and isolated her until she could only depend on him. That’s not a marriage. That’s abuse.” He smiled wryly. “Trust me. I’m a psychologist. I know these things.”

She stopped trying to pull away from him. A smile formed on her lips.

“I love your independence and your toughness. I love the fact that you throw yourself into your endeavors like they’re life or death. I even kind of enjoy your bossiness. But, Rachel, believe me when I say you are all of those things even if you never step foot in a kitchen again. You may be a wonderful, talented chef, but it’s not all you are.” He took her face in his hands. “You are not the sum of your accomplishments or your failures. You have absolutely nothing to prove —not to me, not to your critics, and certainly not to your stepfather. If God had wanted you to be anything other than who and what you are, He would have made you that way.”

She stared up at him for several moments. “For the record, I think you would have made a really good psychologist.”

“I wasn’t trying to get into your head, Rachel. I only —”

She stretched up on tiptoes and brushed her lips against his, stilling the rest of his words and his breath. “You don’t need to explain. I trust you.”

A proposal would have been less surprising than those words. He pulled her close and kissed her again, determined that he would live up to her faith in him, no matter what.