Page 56 of Midnight Secrets

She’d been tracing a pattern in the tablecloth with the tines of her fork and looked up. “Yeah. I guess so.”

There was something in her voice.

“You ever think about starting it up again?”

Isabel sighed. “Off and on. And only in the past few weeks. But it would be like starting over and it took years of very hard work to get to where I was. I don’t think I have that kind of energy anymore. And I did a lot of research and sometimes I traveled to get local recipes and pictures.”

“I don’t think you’d have to work that hard,” Joe protested. “I mean these things go viral, don’t they? As soon as word gets around that you’re starting up again, readers will flock back.”

“Maybe.”

“And, well, if you can hold off for when I’m free, I’ll accompany you on your trips. We could do it on weekends. Don’t know anything about food but I can carry your bags for you. Prime bag-carrier, top tier. And I work cheap. For food.”

That brought a smile to her face, a little less sad. “Yeah?”

“Oh yeah.” Joe put certainty in his voice. Very aware of the fact that this was the first time any kind of future was mentioned between them. It was going to keep cropping up because he had no intention of leaving her side. Did she want to go to Tallahassee to research chitlins? Joe was right there. “Is it still online?”

Isabel’s eyes widened. “Do you know—I don’t know. Isn’t that crazy? I haven’t looked at it once since…since the Massacre. It probably is.”

It wasn’t crazy. Joe was firmly of the suck-it-up-and-move-on school. Her life had come to a standstill and she’d just dropped everything. But Isabel loved what she did. It had given her joy and maybe it could give her joy again.

“Lately, even before the Massacre, I’d eased up because I had another project.”

Her eyes had gone back down to the tablecloth.

“Which was?”

“Well, I was taking notes for a book. I wanted it to be a big book, full of beautiful illustrations. Full of information and recipes. A celebration of food. A book you can dip into and always find something interesting. An agent was interested.”

Joe put his hand over hers. “That sounds fantastic. I’m sure it would be a great book, a bestseller. Do you still have those notes?”

“Oh yes,” she breathed. Joe looked into those beautiful eyes and saw something that made his heart thump hard in his chest.

Hope.

Isabel had hope again. She was coming back and she would be stronger than before, because that was the way it worked. If you were broken and came back, you were stronger in the broken places.

He squeezed her hand gently. “Sounds like writing a book is going to be in your immediate future. And picking up the blog again too. Can I see it?”

“The blog?” Isabel rose and Joe noticed that she seemed to be moving more easily, too. He was beginning to see the magnificent woman she must have been and would be again. Beautiful beyond words, graceful, smart, knowledgeable. Capable of moving millions of people with her own passion. “Sure. If it’s still there.”

She went to her desk and clicked a key to turn the monitor on. In a second she’d pulled up a home page. She turned the screen so Joe could see better. He pulled up a chair and sat down and was instantly lost.

The blog was beautiful to look at. Across the top a carousel of brightly colored photos floated from left to right. Aged, agile brown hands kneading bread, a smiling farmer holding a bushel of small intensely red apples, two women in hairnets pulling on mozzarella in a vat, making knots, another woman rolling rice inside a grape leaf…the images went on and on. The quality was exquisite, many of the images were in sunlight and all of them celebrated the joys of the products of the earth.

“You’ve got a great photographer.”

She was watching the screen with him, the colors so intense they reflected off her pale skin. “Thanks. I took most of those.”

Astounded, Joe watched more images march across the header. His first impression was right. The photographer was inspired. And the photographer was Isabel.

“These are incredible images. Makes you want to reach into the screen and pull something to eat out.”

“Thanks. I’ve traveled a lot and I like to take photos. I had a whole bunch in my archive so when I started the blog I put together a slide show of some of the photos I’d taken. It was just a question of balancing out the color palette and making sure there was a flow from one photo to the next.”

“Huh,” Joe grunted. He’d never have thought of that for a blog header, not in a million years. The blogs he read had to do with geopolitics and gear. But now that he was paying attention, he saw that from photo to photo there was a slow continuity of color, an intensely pleasing sense of balance.

He scrolled down and saw that the blog was dated two days before the Massacre.

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