There were thirty flawless porcelain plates arranged across a long white marble table. Thirty glasses shimmering under an extravagant chandelier. Thirty napkins folded with almost painful perfection.
And behind the swinging kitchen door, swallowed by heat, steam, and the scent of spices… was me.
Lily Bennett.
The wife of the man who owned the house.
But that night, in his eyes, I wasn’t his wife.
I was “the help.”
The one who should stay out of sight.
The one who shouldn’t speak.
The one who shouldn’t exist in that room.
Sweat ran down my back as I stirred the mole in the clay pot I had carried with me from far away. My grandmother’s worn green apron was tied tightly around my waist, and the air inside the kitchen felt thick, almost too heavy to breathe.
Outside, laughter floated in—smooth, polished, effortless.
Inside, every simmering bubble reminded me who I was… and everything Adrian had tried for years to erase.
It hadn’t always been this way.
When he first met me, it was my cooking that made him look at me like I was something extraordinary. At a small gathering, he tasted my mole, closed his eyes, and said he had never felt something so deep reach both his mouth and his heart at once.