He looked at her from the corner of his eye. It was just a look—nothing that necessarily meant anything. But Chloe knew him, knew the way his eyes narrowed when he was thinking, knew the way his lips thinned when he decided not to speak his doubts. She knew what this meant: he was still uncertain that she should be involved.
He pushed a bowl forward. “Have breakfast.”
Idly, Chloe wondered if Jeremy had eaten yet. If she should have—for the sake of his ten pounds, if not old times—invited him in. Instead, she’d told him to meet her on the village green in an hour and a half.
No. Better to maintain a fence between them. He’d offered her money; she’d accepted. That made this a matter of business. Business acquaintances didn’t dine together in the early hours of the morning.
She ripped the bun in half and inhaled the scent of yeast, then dipped it in the sauce. The depth of flavor—the roundness on the back of her tongue—that hint of heat right at the end… She let out a noise.
“Perfection.” Her eyes slid shut. “You see? It’s absolute perfection.”
Her father held up a hand. “There is no such thing as perfection.”
Chloe held up her bun. “What do you call this then?”
Even the taste of Unnamed Sauce was not enough to distract her. Chloe was lying to herself. And she was bad at lying even if she was the only target.
Really. Trying to fool herself into thinking Jeremy was a business acquaintance? Ha. She’d seen the way he looked at her. She knew how she had once looked at him. If she told herself falsehoods, the truth would take her by surprise, and there was no room for unwelcome surprises at the moment.
Her father frowned. “Something will go wrong if you keep boasting. It’s bad luck.”
Bad luck. That’s what she was courting with these lies. Over these next few days, no matter what she told herself, one thing mattered and one thing alone. She had to successfully launch Unnamed Sauce.
“Boo.” Chloe folded her arms and took another bite. “Ah Ba, I’m telling the truth. This is your moment of triumph. People from all over England will take home jars of your sauce. They’ll share them with friends and family and—” She paused, not knowing how to say telegraph in Hakka, and rearranged her sentence. “They’ll write to order more. Just imagine: White and Whistler visit their warehouses one day and realize—”
“That wouldn’t happen,” her father interjected. “Visiting warehouses is work. White and Whistler visit inns for ale, not warehouses for information.”
Chloe waved a hand and altered the trajectory of her imagination. “A man from their warehouses visits them with bad news. Their stock of White and Whistler’s Pure English Sauce is only taking space and gathering dust. Orders are down. They start looking for a reason and discover that newspapers are saying that White and Whistler’s Pure English Sauce is boring in comparison to…” Well. Her dream would work better if she’d hit upon a name for their sauce yet. She hadn’t, and matters were getting rather dire. “Um.”
“None of that.” Her father frowned, straightening from where he leaned against the table. “And don’t insult Pure English Sauce. I made that for them, you know.”
Mere details. She waved a hand. “Then they’ll say it’s unrefined.” He hadn’t had time to improve it, after all, and they’d tossed him out before he had a chance to apply years of meticulous testing to achieve perfection. “Instead, everyone is buying—”
“Stop,” her father said. But the corner of his mouth curled up. “Stop dreaming. Start eating. You’re too skinny.”
She had never been anything of the kind. But this was what love looked like between them—him cooking her food so perfect that she could cry, while he frowned at her and told her she was too skinny. When she’d been teased as a child for her lists, he’d been there for her, perfecting his sauce as best as he could, serving up plate after plate of food so good that it almost defeated her loneliness.
This—seeing his dream come to fruition—was the only thing she could allow herself to care about right now.
He set a clay pot and a bowl on the table in front of her with a thump. “Eat.”
“Ah Ba, I am eating already. I can’t eat all that.”
He had taken his promise that she wouldn’t starve very seriously. That was another one of her early memories—sitting at a different table, feeling a cold chill, and being told to eat.
She had been born in Trinidad, but she had no memory of that country. Her parents had traveled there as laborers. It was there, at the end of her father’s indenture, that he had encountered Mr. White and Mr. Whistler, travelers who had quickly become enamored of his cookery. They’d marveled over his dishes and his sauces. Her Ba hadn’t had the money to return to China; he’d been considering a second indenture. They’d offered him an exorbitant amount of money to come to England instead.
Spend a few years with them, they had whispered. Develop a method for making sauces that could be produced commercially for the English market. He would end up rich, they had promised, with wealth enough to return to China and set up a household where he could live in comfort and see his daughter respectably married.
He and tiny Chloe had been brought over the ocean in something like luxury. He hadn’t signed a contract because they were friends, and friends didn’t need such things.
They’d tasted his sauce after the first month and pronounced him a fraud who had fooled them. It didn’t matter that he’d earnestly explained that the mix needed time to ferment. They’d tossed him out with no money, no means of returning to China—with nothing but Chloe and his skills as a cook. And when he’d tried to argue, they’d told him he should thank them for the opportunity of being abandoned in a country where he knew nobody.
Some time later, he’d discovered that White and Whistler had taken the sauce he’d left behind in the barrel, used the instructions that they had written out as he worked, and sold the resulting sauce as “White and Whistler’s Pure English Sauce.” They’d made a fortune.
Ever since then, he’d started to develop his own sauce. Something better, tastier, richer, more balanced. His cooking had always been excellent, but the addition of spite to every recipe had brought an extra level of brilliance.
Chloe took a pair of chopsticks. The food her father cooked at home was like nothing she had found anywhere else—not in England, not even in Wedgeford, where they were not the only Chinese family, not even the only Hakka family.
The rice in the clay pot was perfect, little holes made by rising steam separating fluffy, individual grains. In the other bowl, fried into soft golden wedges, was a swirl of long strings of salted, preserved radish bound together with beaten egg, dotted with green scallions. Once those scallions would have been sliced into paper-thin circles. Now that it was harder for him to hold the cleaver, the little green flecks were somewhat larger. She took a wedge.
“Mmm.” Her first mouthful of egg was soft and fluffy in perfect counterpoint to the salty, chewy radish. The scallions lent a pungency to the dish, no matter their size. “So good, Ah Ba.”
“You would be able to eat more if you spent less time praising the food.” His words were stern, but the corners of his eyes crinkled in pleasure.