"I don't kid about bread."
"This is a professional kitchen."
"It's a kitchen."
"Wes. This is a professional kitchen. This oven costs more than my car."
"Most things cost more than your car."
"That's fair but also rude."
He moved to the counter with the ease of a man entering the one room where he felt completely at home. His body language changed. The rigidity in his shoulders softened. His hands, which were always either clenched or trembling or carefully controlled, relaxed at his sides. In this kitchen, with the marble under his palms and the bread cooling on the board, Wes Chen was a different person. A calmer person. A person who existed at a lower frequency than the one the rest of the world encountered.
He cut the bread. The knife moved through the crust with a sound that was deeply, almost obscenely satisfying, and the interior was revealed in cross-section: open crumb, irregular holes, the telltale signs of a long fermentation and a practiced hand. He placed a slice on a small plate and reached into the refrigerator and produced a jar of homemade butter.
"You make your own butter," I said. This was not a question.
"It's not difficult."
"You make your own bread and your own butter. In a professional kitchen. In secret."
"It's not a secret. It's private."
"What's the difference?"
"A secret is something you hide because you're ashamed of it. Privacy is something you keep because it's yours and you're not obligated to share it."
He said this with his back to me, spreading butter on the bread with a knife that he handled with more care than I'd ever seen him handle a hockey stick. The answer was articulate andprecise and revealed a level of self-awareness that contradicted everything I thought I knew about Wes Chen. This was not a man who lacked emotional intelligence. This was a man who had it in abundance and had chosen to deploy it selectively, and the kitchen was where the deployment happened.
He set the plate in front of me. One slice of sourdough with homemade butter, the butter already melting into the warm bread, glistening.
I took a bite.
I am Italian. I grew up in a house where food was religion and the kitchen was the church and my grandmother was the pope. I have strong opinions about bread. I have eaten bread in Rome and Florence and a tiny bakery in Puglia where the baker was ninety-three years old and had been making the same loaf for seventy years. I know bread.
This was exceptional bread.
The crust shattered and gave way to an interior that was soft and tangy and complex, the sourness balanced by a sweetness that came from the long fermentation, and the butter was rich and slightly salted and melted on my tongue, and the combination was so good that I closed my eyes and made a sound that I am not going to describe because it was involuntary and embarrassing and if Sofia ever found out about it she would bring it up at every family gathering for the rest of my life.
When I opened my eyes, Wes was watching me.
His expression was unguarded in a way I had never seen. Not the controlled blankness. Not even the tentative softening that appeared when he almost smiled. Something else. Something that looked like hope. The specific, fragile hope of a man who had made something with his hands and was watching someone experience it and was waiting to find out if the thing he made was good enough to bridge the distance between himself and another person.
"This is incredible," I said.
"It's bread."
"This is not bread. This is a religious experience. This is the bread that God intended when He invented wheat. If you served this in a restaurant, people would weep."
"You're being dramatic."
"I'm being Italian. It's the same thing."
He leaned against the counter across from me and crossed his arms and the ghost of the smile appeared again, closer to the surface than it had ever been. His eyes were on me and they were warm in a way that I had not previously known his eyes were capable of being. Warm and watchful and carrying something that he was holding back with visible effort.
"Nobody knows about this," he said.
"About the bread?"