3. Mattias

Cooking was the one thing at the inn that was familiar and if not the same as my fast-paced kitchen in New York, comfortable.

Well, no, the whole inn was comfortable in the way the house you grew up in was always comfortable, forever. You woke up and recognized the ceiling and felt like you were welcome there. It was like waking up into a warm hug.

The difference was that cooking didn't remind me of Grandpa the same as the rest of it. Cooking let me fall into the work mindset. That moment of frenetic energy where I had to focus on four things at once, and if I dropped any one ball, the whole of breakfast was likely to end up burned and unrecognizable and fit not even to feed to the local wildlife.

Cooking didn't leave me time to muse on what my life was becoming, and whether it was what I wanted or not.

It was, right?

The oatmeal bubbled, perfect and finished, so I jumped back to work, setting up a tray with three bowls, covered with an array of other things to add to it, from pecans to strawberries to chocolate chips.

Not that I put chocolate chips in my own oatmeal.

No, that was a filthy lie. I always put chocolate chips in my oatmeal. Not that I was five, just... it was oatmeal. It wasn't exactly the most appealing meal, unless you added a bunch of stuff with actual flavor and texture.

A plate of bacon, scrambled eggs, a pile of fresh sourdough toast with a pot of grandma's best blackberry jam from the previous summer, and that was Friday breakfast. I did more impressive options on the weekends, stuffed French toast and gingerbread pancakes and... well, weekend breakfast was rather more like dessert than anything else.

Okay, so maybe I was a five-year-old on the inside. But come on, gingerbread pancakes with buttermilk syrup—was there anything better on a cool fall day?

Trick question. Anyone who'd ever had them knew the answer was no.

Finally finished, I piled the trays onto the serving cart and slowly wheeled it out into the dining room, where the picture-perfect family was sitting around our big central table.

Fuck me, but I kept expecting a camera crew to pop out of thin air and start positioning them for their photo shoot. They were just so perfect. And business dad was smart, too. A reader of giant fantasy doorstoppers. Jesus. I wanted that life so bad I could taste it.

The kiddo was playing with a little plastic frog, making it hop over each piece of their place setting, while business dad—Connor, his name was Connor. I had to stop treating them like they were a nameless family in a cute cereal commercial. Connor was reading the Wall Street Journal. An actual, physical newspaper. Weird.

Fashion dad, whose name I still didn't know, was reading something on his phone, looking a little... sad? Longing? As I wheeled the tray up, I caught sight of a gorgeous beach sunset photo on the phone. Maybe he was looking at pictures of some other gorgeous place they'd gone before. Or some rich friend's island vacation wishing he were there instead of boring little Cider Landing.

Hard to blame him.

Well, no, it was easy to blame him. Cider Landing was awesome, and there was a ton of fun stuff to do. Sure, we didn't have white sand beaches and fuchsia purple sunsets with swaying palm trees, but we had stuff that was just as great.

The kiddo, Jessie, dropped their frog when I showed up with food, perking up and looking over what I'd brought. They looked initially unimpressed, scrunching their nose at the eggs and bacon, but then they spotted the little container of chocolate chips and their eyes went comically round and excited. "Is that chocolate? I can have chocolate?"

Fashion dad snorted. "Don't be ridiculous. It's breakfast. We don't eat chocolate for breakfast."

Jessie scowled at him. "You don't ever eat chocolate."

"Exactly," fashion dad agreed. "And you should take a cue from that. It's not good for you."

All the nutrition facts I knew about chocolate bubbled up inside me, about phenols and how fat didn't deserve the bad reputation it had gotten in the nineties, and how companies had replaced fat with sugar in foods to make them "healthier," and how it had contributed to the health problems in the country, but... well, Jessie didn't care, and fashion dad didn't want to hear it. So I just set out foods in front of them and let them make their own choices.

Jessie... well, Jessie didn't seem to have a lot of trust in fashion dad. They looked over to Connor. "I can eat the oatmeal, right?"

"Of course, kiddo," Connor answered, and for a second I thought he wouldn't even look up from his paper. But he did. Thank fuck. "Why?"

Jessie, of course, wasn't looking at the oatmeal, but the chocolate chips, biting their lip.

Connor cocked his head at it, then looked up at me. "Chocolate chips for oatmeal?"

I shrugged. "They melt in. It's really good. Some peanuts, a little brown sugar, it's like a Snickers bar, only healthier."

"Huh." He leaned forward, looking at the choices, then nodded. "That sounds pretty good. I think I'll have some too."

"Connor," fashion dad hissed. "That's not a healthy breakfast. Shouldn't we be modeling appropriate eating habits?"

"Oatmeal is high in fiber," I pointed out. I couldn't help it. "Low fat. Lots of vitamins and minerals we need. The American Heart Association recommends it."

"With chocolate?" fashion dad demanded, giving me a wicked "bitch, please," expression.

And you know what? Fuck it. I'd spent years in school. I knew better than him. "A single serving of chocolate is actually pretty healthy. It's full of antioxidants that have been proven to reduce inflammation. As long as you don't only eat chocolate, it's a good addition to a healthy diet."

"I wanna only eat chocolate," Jessie informed us all. "But I'll eat oatmeal too if I can have chocolate in it."

Damn that kid was adorable, with their golden curls and bright blue eyes. They could look at me with those eyes and say they shot a man in Reno just to watch him die, and I'd be hard pressed to do anything but coo.

"Sounds good to me," Connor said, grabbing two bowls and throwing a more than healthy serving of chocolate chips on each, then peanuts and brown sugar, as I'd suggested. "Besides, we're on vacation. It's time to eat fun things, right?"

"Right," Jessie agreed, grinning and sitting forward when Connor gave them the bowl. They stirred it up and shoved a huge bite of the concoction in their mouth the moment the chocolate had started to melt, and groaned aloud. "It's so good. How come we never have chocolate oatmeal at home?"

Fashion dad made a face, ignoring me and Jessie both and throwing raisins on his own oatmeal. Then almonds. And no sugar. Gross.

Not that I disliked raisins or almonds, but oatmeal with no sugar? Did he hate himself?

Connor smiled up at me. "Thank you, Mattias. This is delicious. Perfect vacation breakfast."

I nodded, finished unloading the toast and jam onto the table, and got the hell out of there. I was not replacing fashion dad with myself in my head. Nope nope nope. Not appropriate. Connor was married to the guy. Just because I'd gotten a bad impression didn't make him a bad person. He was worried about his kid eating healthy, even if he didn't know as much about nutrition as I did. Most people didn't, after all. They hadn't studied it as part of their college courses.

Just because most chefs ignored nutrition in favor of more butter in everything didn't mean we didn't know about it. Butter just tasted good, dammit, and life was too short for dry toast and plain oatmeal.

Somehow, though, I needed to stop seeing myself in that little slice of perfect family. It was weird. I'd never really thought about that life until now. Maybe it was losing Grandpa, and missing part of my own little family unit, that was making me think about it. Maybe I'd just been ignoring the little hole in my own heart that had always kind of wanted that life. Husband, kid, adorable vacation plans. Fuck me, they were gonna go hiking or something, weren't they?

A door opened nearby, and I heard Grandma greet someone at the front desk. So I pushed off the wall and shook myself to bring the world back into focus. I wasn't going to magically find myself a family any time soon. I had responsibilities right now, and they didn't include trying to seduce an already married man. That wasn't my life. My life was trying to fix the inn and our money problems.