Page 44 of Blood Orange Christmas
“It won’t.” He sets his cup down, palm flat on the counter. “I will move mountains with my hands.”
“You can’t move everything,” I remind him, and he nods, accepts it, and then looks at Marco again like he plans to try anyway.
The day builds itself the way big days do—fast and long at the same time. The villa hums under the polite noises people make when they bring old grudges to a holiday and dress them in cologne. Drivers back into gravel like ballerinas pretending to be trucks. A cousin laughs at nothing on the steps like he’s paid by the decibel. Camilla’s phones blink, then stop, then blink again like little metronomes. The saints in the hall watch with the same raised hands they had yesterday. They don’t bless. They witness.
I put on my apron and build a day I can win. The Morettis like big flavors and food that remembers Sicily. They like to be reminded the sea exists to feed them. So I make swordfish stew that tastes like a story your grandmother told you and you only half believed until the spoon touched your mouth.
The fish comes in thick steaks, firm and almost sweet when it’s right, treacherous when it isn’t. I trim it myself, sliding the knife under the membrane, feeling for the line where the skin gives. The bones go into a pot with onion ends and fennel tops and the stubborn parts of parsley, covered with water and kissed with white wine and a coin of orange peel. I bring it just to a simmer and keep it there—no violence—so the stock stays clear and honest.
In the big rondeau, I warm olive oil until it sighs and then slide in the soffritto—finely chopped onion, fennel bulb shaved thin, a clove of garlic smashed so it knows it wasn’t invited by accident. It goes glossy and soft, the fennel waking up sweet under theheat. I add a spoon of tomato paste and let it toast until it goes brick red and smells like a street in summer. Then crushed tomatoes go in, San Marzano from a can because the good ones know how to wait, and I stir until the oil paints the sauce and the sauce answers back.
Capers get rinsed and tossed in, little bombs of salt and history. A palmful of green olives, pitted and torn with my fingers because the knife makes them behave too much. A pinch of chile—Calabrian paste today, dark and round, heat that rolls rather than stabs. A few raisins for the Morettis because their aunts would approve, and a scatter of pine nuts later, for texture and memory. I pour in a ladle of the fish stock, then another, and let the stew breathe. The room smells like a chapel by the sea.
The swordfish goes in near the end, cut into fat cubes that will stay tender if you treat them like they’re listening. If you boil it, it will punish you. If you wait, it will reward you. I season the cubes with salt and a thread of lemon zest and slide them into the simmer so they poach in the sauce like they’re being told a secret they want to hear. I don’t stir hard. I nudge. The heat does the rest.
“Bread?” Gabriella asks, already reaching.
“Two kinds,” I say, because you don’t make a stew like this and then starve the plate. “Garlic rubbed. And plain, for the saints.”
She smiles because she knows. She always knows.
I move through the kitchen like a woman who trusts her hands. I taste. I adjust. I add a spoon of stock and watch the line of oil on top go from too proud to just right. I squeeze half an orange into the pot because Sicilians understand sunshine in a bowl. I chop parsley and fennel fronds together and make a rough gremolatawith lemon zest that will wake the stew at the pass. I set aside a little bowl for Marco, no chile, extra bread, because we teach him with tastings and he learns fast.
Dante doesn’t hover. He ghosts in and out, jacket on now, coat open, hands empty, eyes always cutting to the places that matter. He stops at the door twice to watch me and doesn’t speak because he knows the language. The second time, he leans and kisses the top of my head, quick and sure, then goes without making it a thing. My heart stumbles and continues walking. I let it.
The kitchen has a rhythm and the room knows it. Knives talk to boards. Pots whisper. The dishwasher hums a tune I almost remember. Staff move around each other in those little near-misses that mean trust. Then Paolo walks through the swinging door, and the whole room inhales and forgets to let it out.
He smiles with his whole mouth and none of his eyes. He’s dressed like a man who thinks linen solves problems. His shoes don’t have a speck on them and we’re in a kitchen in December. He says my name like it’s a question he already answered. “Chef.”
“Not your cousin,” I say without looking up from the stew. “Not your boss. Not your anything. What do you need, Paolo?”
“Only to pay my respects,” he says, stepping exactly one plank farther than a guest belongs. “This room saved the night. I’m a grateful man.”
“I’ve never seen you eat,” I answer, tasting, salting, ignoring the way every set of shoulders in the room went up and stayed there.
He laughs softly and lets his gaze slide across the knives on the magnetic strip, the sauce on the lip of my pan, the station Imoved closer to the cellar door because Dante and I decided it was a smart kind of dangerous. “Maybe I’m a man who survives on gratitude.”
“Then you’re starving,” I say, finally meeting his eyes because I want him to see that I see the shine there and the thinness underneath. “You can leave my side of the pass now. We don’t plate compliments here.”
He lifts his hands in surrender, elusive and slow, and backs out, letting the door kiss his shoulder on the way. The room exhales in a shape that isn’t quite relief.
Luca appears where Paolo was half a second ago, like he was always there. He looks at the door, then at me. He doesn’t joke. That’s the joke. “You want a chair wedged under that handle, Chef?”
“I want him to stop testing how close he can get to my stove,” I say, watching the oil on the stew, the way it holds the light. “And I want the knife roll that lives under the pass.”
Gabriella is already sliding it out, leather worn soft by years of my hands. I pop the buckles with muscle memory and feel for weight before I even look. The knives have a way they sit when they’re home. Every one has its sound on the canvas. The paring knife whispers. The boning knife mutters. The serrated sighs. The gyuto sings when you touch it—the twenty-one-centimeter chef’s knife with the lemonwood handle, the one I reach for without thinking. Its absence rings louder than a pan hitting tile.
“One’s missing,” I say, calm because if I let panic in, it will knock down the pots. “The one I use.”
“The santoku?” Gabriella asks, already scanning the stations, the dish pit, her hands moving on their own.
“The gyuto,” I say. “Lemonwood. A scratch near the ferrule that looks like a crescent moon. If anyone touched it, they need to say it now.”
No one speaks. Not because they’re afraid of me. Because they’re afraid they missed something and the missing thing has teeth.
“I saw you use it at lunch,” the pastry girl offers, voice small, willing herself into usefulness. “On the fennel.”
“I put it back,” I say, and I did, because knives go where they live or people get hurt.
