Chapter 47: Nonna Is Teaching Eve How To Cook Ragu

POV: EVE

She woke before Dimitri for the first time.

It was early....barely six, the city outside still grey and undecided about the day, she lay still for a moment just noticing it. The unfamiliar novelty of being the one awake first. Of watching him sleep instead of being watched.

He slept differently than she would have expected. No iron control, no careful stillness. Just a man, deeply asleep, one arm thrown across the space where she’d been lying, his face unguarded in a way it almost never was during daylight hours. The scar along his ribs rose and fell with his breathing. His hair was disordered. He looked younger. Almost approachable.

She studied him for longer than she meant to.

Six weeks ago she had woken up in this bed in horror, clutching a contract she barely remembered signing, looking at this man like he was a cage. Now she woke up and looked at him like he was the most interesting thing she’d ever been given access to. The shift between those two points was so complete that sometimes it startled her....not with regret, but with the sheer velocity of it. How fast she had fallen. How thoroughly.

How willingly, in the end.

She slipped out of bed without waking him, pulled on his shirt, and went to find coffee.

Nonna was already in the kitchen.

Of course she was.

Eve had been living with Dimitri for six weeks and she was still not entirely sure the woman slept. Every morning Nonna was simply there....coffee made, something on the stove, the kitchen already carrying the warm smell of butter and herbs and things that took time Eve hadn’t witnessed being spent.

"Sit," Nonna said without turning around.

Eve sat. Coffee appeared in front of her, black with two sugars, and she wrapped both hands around it and felt the day begin properly.

"You woke before him today," Nonna observed.

"How do you know?"

"Because when he wakes first, he makes the coffee himself. It’s always slightly too strong." She finally turned, leaning against the counter with her own cup. "He’s been sleeping better. Since you came."

Eve looked at her over the rim of her mug. "Has he?"

"Before you, he slept four hours on a good night. Sometimes less." Nonna’s eyes were steady. "I used to hear him moving around this penthouse at two, three in the morning. Calls, work, whatever it was he used instead of sleep." A pause. "I don’t hear that anymore."

Eve didn’t know what to do with that, so she just held it quietly.

"What are we making?" she asked, nodding at the ingredients on the counter.

Nonna’s face shifted into something that was equal parts warmth and challenge.

"You," she said, setting down her cup and moving to the counter with the decisive energy of a woman who had made up her mind, "are going to learn how to make ragù."

"Nonna, I genuinely cannot cook...."

"I know. I have seen what you do to eggs." She pointed at the spot beside her. "Come."

Eve went to her.

The lesson took two hours.

Not because ragù was complicated....though it was more involved than Eve had realized, involving a specific sequence of steps that Nonna treated with the gravity of law....but because Nonna taught the way she did everything: thoroughly, with full commentary, and with occasional detours into Italian that Eve was apparently now expected to follow.

"Soffriggi....you see? Gently. Not burning. Piano, piano."

"Piano piano," Eve repeated, stirring more carefully.

"Good. Lentamente....slowly. Always slowly with this. You rush it, you ruin it."

"Lentamente."

"Your accent is terrible."

"Thank you, Nonna."

"But it’s getting less terrible. This is progress." She appeared beside Eve and adjusted her grip on the wooden spoon with the calm authority of someone who had been correcting people’s technique for fifty years. "The secret is time. You cannot make ragù fast. It needs to cook for four hours minimum. Six is better. Some people say eight."

"Eight hours for sauce?"

"For ragù. Sauce is something different. Americans call everything sauce." She said this with gentle but absolute contempt. "This is ragù. It is a different thing entirely."

"Ragù," Eve said carefully.

"Better." Nonna moved back to her own station, began doing three other things simultaneously in the way she always did, apparently incapable of focusing on fewer than four tasks at once. "He watches you when you don’t know he’s looking," she said, without particular emphasis. Just information, offered alongside the cooking instruction.

Eve kept stirring. "I know."

"You don’t mind?"

"I used to." She considered. "Now it just feels like... him. Like something he does. Like coffee before I wake up or the way he always puts his hand at my back when we walk somewhere." She paused. "I’d notice if it stopped."

Nonna was quiet for a moment.

"Brava," she said softly. Just that.

***

Dimitri appeared at half past eight.

He stopped in the kitchen doorway and took in the scene.....Eve at the stove, Nonna beside her giving instructions in a mixture of English and Italian, the kitchen warm and fragrant, with an expression that passed across his face too quickly to fully catch. Something unguarded. Something that sat in the vicinity of undone.

Then it was gone, replaced by the usual composed attention.

"You’re cooking," he said.

"I’m learning to cook," Eve corrected. "There’s a difference apparently."

"Ragù," Nonna said proudly. "She has good instincts. Terrible accent. Good instincts."

Dimitri crossed to Eve, looked into the pot, and then looked at her with something warm in his grey eyes. "You took instruction from Nonna voluntarily."

"She didn’t give me a choice."

"No one ever does." He pressed a kiss to her temple....easy, automatic, the gesture of a man who had stopped calculating whether to do it and simply did it....and reached past her for the coffee.

She watched him from the corner of her eye.

That was new. That easiness. Six weeks ago every touch had been deliberate....claimed, controlled, a demonstration of ownership. Now sometimes he just... touched her. Without architecture. Without agenda.

She was memorising these things without meaning to. The small migrations of his behavior, the incremental evidence of a man being changed by something he hadn’t planned for.