Page 52 of Dose

“Come on,” he says.

“Where?”

“Kitchen.” He is already walking. “You ate half a piece of toast this morning.”

So he noticed one concrete thing. Not everything. Not my heart rate, my thoughts, or the seventeen ambush scenarios currently circling my head. Half a piece of toast.

I follow him.

He takes vegetables from the refrigerator and places a cutting board in front of me. “Dice those. Small enough to cook evenly.”

The repetition helps. Or it would if my pieces did not range from laboratory precision to structural debris.

“Terrible,” I mutter.

“Distracted.” Raphael sets a second knife on the board and demonstrates the grip with his own hand. “Curl your fingertips. Guide with the knuckle. Do not rush.”

I copy him. The next pieces improve.

“Now tell me what you’re worried about,” he says.

The knife pauses against the board.

“I don’t know what I’m doing.” The confession escapes before I can contain it. “Caring about someone. Having someone to lose. I spent eighteen years learning not to want anything, and now I want too much. I don’t know what to do with the fear attached to it.”

Raphael heats oil in a pan. “You do not have to turn every feeling into a procedure.”

“That sounds irresponsible.”

“To you, probably.” He adds garlic. “Your nervous system learned that absence precedes harm. Now someone matters enough for his absence to frighten you. It is understandable. It is also exhausting.”

“And counterproductive.”

“Yes.”

“You are not making a persuasive case for attachment.”

“I’m feeding you, not selling you anything.”

Despite myself, I laugh.

He tips the vegetables into the pan. They hiss against the oil, and the kitchen fills with garlic and herbs.

“How do you live with it?” I ask. “All of you. How do you care about people and still function when they are in danger?”

He considers before answering.

“Badly, some days. Nikolai checks that Jenna is breathing when she sleeps. Damon counts time in Darius’s voice when they are separated on an operation. We prepare for what can go wrong, then try not to punish the people we love for frightening us.”

“Does that work?”

“Not consistently.”

That is more comforting than false certainty would have been.

“You keep your body functional,” he continues. “You eat. You sleep if you can. You give your hands a task while there is nothing useful to do. When information arrives, you deal with what happened instead of everything you imagined.”

We finish cooking in companionable silence. He teaches me when to add salt and makes me taste the sauce before altering it. By the time we sit down, my hands are steady.