Josh knew that Mastering the Art of French Cooking was no Weight Watchers Complete Cookbook, but he kept hearing in his head what Gabi had said about her date yesterday: "and he's cooking dinner for me." So here it was, eight o'clock on a Friday night, and he was simmering bouillabaisse, a Provençal fish stew à la Julia Child, to go with her recipe for plain French bread that had been rising and being kneaded at intervals ever since he'd woken up far too early this morning. The only thought in his head had been inane—the fact that Gabi had left all of her baking supplies behind. He figured it was some final remnant of a dream about Gabi, brioche, and custard, that could have been either about Gabi and sex or Gabi and how fat he'd gotten.

He'd given up fighting all these connections. There was just some way in which food and Gabi couldn't be pulled apart for him, anymore. He was using her chopping boards and her tattered cookbook, her yeast and her packet of dried herbs. She wasn't here. He was. This wasn't waiting for her. This was… something else.

He'd figure it out eventually.

Still, when his cellphone buzzed with the opening chords of The Doors' "People Are Strange"—his doorman, calling to say someone was here for him—he couldn't help but hope it washer.

"Hey, Rayjack, how's it hanging?"

"Not too bad, Josh. I have a Sofia Rodriguez here, but you don't have her on your 'anytime' list…"

Josh thought for a split second. "Put her on it and send her up, would you?"

"You got it."

He spun to his liquor cabinet. Sofia could be here for only one of two reasons: to rage at him about something he'd done to Gabi, or to ask for help—with something to do with Gabi. She'd want wine, probably. Or tequila. He grabbed both.

"I'm sorry for barging in," Sofia said, oddly breathless although she'd clearly taken the elevator and not the stairs, to get here so fast. The stairs were a part of Josh's weight loss regimen and a way of managing his elevator phobia. He knew exactly how long the stairs took.

"No worries. You hungry? I was about to sit down and eat."

Sofia, still not having decided whether she would take off her gray corduroy jacket, went still in surprise. "You… cooked?"

"Yeah. Fish stew."

"For… for yourself?"

"No one else to do it."

"Yeah, I guess not." She pulled off her coat and tossed it on the back of the couch—her idea of graciously agreeing to stay for dinner, he supposed. "Do I smell homemade bread?"

"You do." Josh shook his head, bemused. "Cooking's not that hard, you know. It's just time-consuming. My time is usually better spent doing something more…" He cut himself off, but Sofia heard what he didn't say.

"Lucrative?" she suggested easily, reaching for the corkscrew and the bottle of wine.

He shrugged, and didn't meet her eyes. "Pretty much. Anybody will deliver any kind of food. For a price."

Dispensing with the wine, Sofia moved ably to add an extra bowl across from his on the table, as he moved the dutch oven in which the stew had cooked onto a trivet and rustled around for a ladle.

"So," she said, "how come you're not paying that price tonight?"

"Why don't you set the table before you grill me?" he volleyed. The butter crock and two glasses of ice water were on the table before he could so much as cut the first slice of bread; Sofia moved swiftly and efficiently, and was watching him warily all the while.

Sofia's first loyalty, Josh well knew, would always be to Gabi. She didn't trust the same to be true of him.

When they were seated, bowls filled with wild cod, halibut, tomatoes, and clams in a broth it had taken Josh fully four hours to prepare according to the recipe's design, Sofia took her aim, steadied her face, and fired. "Josh. When I found out you came that night—that night you Pretty Woman'ed Gabi on our fire escape, or tried to—I kept your secret. I shouldn't have. If I hadn't, you and Gabi would have been spared all of this, or at least a year of this—heartache."

Josh let the tastes of saffron, fennel, leeks, parsley, thyme, and garlic flow down the sides of his tongue. Sofia's claim was harder to swallow. "No, we wouldn't have."

"You—how do you figure?" She sat with it a moment. "You think you would have had all the same stuff happen because you're our own local dark and twisty Meredith Grey, too broken for love, and you would have wrecked it all the same?"

"Yeah. I don't know who Meredith Grey is. But—yeah. That and…" he leaned his elbows onto the table, ready to level with her. "Gabi's too young for all this, Sofia. Not in years—well, not mainly—but in… caution. She's so—unburdened, so… unflagging. So damn hungry and she just swallows down every new experience that comes her way." He saw her struggle to contain herself and shot her a quelling glance. "Get your mind out of the gutter, Sofia. But… I do sometimes wonder if she's ever met a man she didn't kiss."

Sofia rejected all that with a jerk of her head. "It's not all her fault, you know. She's—"

"Bright. Magnetic. Like a bonfire in a world otherwise lit only by cellphones. Volatile. Dangerous. Friendly. Warm—hot." He sighed the last. "You don't have to tell me that she attracts pretty much everyone she meets. Trust me, I get it."

"OK." Sofia gave up trying to pull the stubborn mussel out of its shell in her bowl. "The fairytale thing hasn't done her any favors, either."

"Right. I keep thinking—you know how Pretty Woman originally ended? In the screenplay and the original filming?"

"Julia Roberts starts pimping out her hooker friends to her newfound wealthy businessman network and becomes the next Heidi Fleiss?" Sofia guessed.

"Close."

Sofia choked on her wine. "Seriously?"

"Yeah. Richard Gere shoves her out of his limo, calls her a whore, throws money at her and drives away. And she's left to… pick up the pieces. The End."

"Christ." She took another long swallow. "You can never tell Gabi that. Promise me."

He rolled his shoulders around. "I didn't treat her too much better, Sof."

"There's plenty of blame to go around between the two of you, bro." She took a steadying breath. "I came here tonight to tell you—Josh. She waited. When you left her—in Hawai'i. She was so sure you would come knocking on our door, like you always had before, to make up, to go for another round of whatever it is the two of you go for. For weeks. She waited, Josh. And I needed to tell you because I can't keep these secrets again if it's going to keep you unnecessarily apart for more time—more months, more years. Because I think—part of her is still waiting."

The silence stretched out between them so palpably that Sofia could almost feel it wrapping around her wrists. "Say something, Josh."

His hands lifted off the table and spread, fell, lifted again, like he was trying to figure out how to direct some unseen orchestra. Finally, he shrugged, trying to move around an invisible weight, and said only: "I know."

"Know… what?"

"I know she's waiting. Is almost… waiting."

"You… how do you know? And if you know… why didn't you come? Why don't you?"

"I could feel her. Those first days, especially. Pulling me. I wanted to go, every day. Hell, every minute. But I just, I knew if I came to her and said, be with me, you're the love of my life… the pattern would hold. And something has to change, in each of us, I think, for that pattern to change. There are things we can't let go of… things we want but can't name. So… yeah. We're both, I think, not exactly waiting."

"Wow. God." Sofia gave up all pretense of eating and pushed the bowl away. "That all sounds plausible, dude. Vague, but plausible."

"Everyday, basically, I fight it out. Part of me says: you idiot. Go to her. Ask her to go away with you, for a week, a month, a year, and work things out, give it the time it needs. And then again, if you could just get her into bed, maybe then…"

"Uh-huh. Sitcom stuff, Kaminsky. What do your better angels say?"

"Right. Exactly. They say we need more time. She needs time to build her career and to… hell, to sow her damn oats. I need time to understand how to avoid my mother's mistakes, my brother's, my own. And to figure out—other than Gabi—what it is that I'm missing."

Sofia was quiet. "You two are so fucking frustrating. Most people figure out at least some of this stuff as they go, you know. You don't have to have all the answers before you couple up together."

"No, but… you have to have enough answers." He shoved his chair back, went to the stairs. "C'mere. I want to show you something."

"Yeah, I'm not sure that's a good idea, bro. I know all too well what happens when you've had a few drinks and invite a girl up to your bedroom." Her tone was mocking, but her voice was just slightly guarded.

He rolled his eyes impatiently. "Sofia. You know how Gabi dated my brother, and then you dated him like seconds after he was Gabi's leftovers?"

"Umm… yep. Safe to say I remember your brother."

"Yeah." He held her brown eyes with clear, guileless blue ones that compelled her to take him seriously. "I'm not like you guys. That's not… that's not a way in which I would mess up. There are lots of others, but—not that. So come on upstairs."

She followed him, and Josh shouldered easily into his room.

"That," he said.

"Yep. That's a bed, alright."

"No, Sofia—the blanket. The point is the blanket."

"Oh." She felt a smile creep up from her heart to her face. "The one Gabi made you. Based on the one your Nonna made, and you lost in the fire." It was spread across the top of his coverlet, the focal point of the whole room, though Sofia noticed it was more toward one side of the bed than the other. Josh's side, she guessed.

"Yes." He reached down to pat it as though it were a reflex he couldn't help, as swift as blinking. "I'm showing you this for a reason. Don't keep my secret, Sofia. Tell her there's not gonna be a woman in my bed while this blanket is there. And this blanket's gonna be there a while. I'm not—I'm not waiting, Sofia. I'm… changing."

There it was. Finally. The missing verb that was driving him.

"I see," she said clearly. And then, "I'll tell her."

He rode down the elevator with her to the parking garage at the end of the evening, after she declined his invitation to come out for a drink with his tech buddies. He stopped her before she ducked into Gabi's car.

"I know I shouldn't ask, but—her date? Last night?"

Sofia clapped his shoulder. "Gambling addict. Tried to get her to bet on whether they'd have sex at the end of the night. Lost track of her at a poker game. She was home by nine."

He nodded, took it in like a wall takes in a missing brick. "Thanks."

"Thanks for dinner."

"Yeah. Anytime."

Because protectiveness was Josh's second and third nature, he leaned back on the concrete wall behind him while she started the car and she got out onto the street.

Now if only he could figure out how to protect himself.