She walked past him toward the pantry, her movements deliberate and quiet. She didn’t reach for the artisanal ingredients the nutritionist had suggested; she reached for the humble, slightly stale loaf of bread and a block of cheddar that had been sitting in the fridge. Alexander watched, baffled, as she fired up the stove. The kitchen, which had been silent for six months, began to fill with the scent of toasted butter and melting cheese—a smell so aggressively normal, so hauntingly common, that it felt like a betrayal of their sophisticated, tragic reality.
“What are you doing?” Alexander asked, his voice raw.