Page 64 of You'll Be the Death of Me

“Unless you count this little adventure,” she said with a coy smile. “Had you ever been to the Bay before? Sorry—forget I asked. I know you don’t remember.”

“Actually—” he said with a tone that made her look up in interest. “I haven’t been here since death, but I do feel a certain...pullto the area, if that makes any sense. Something is familiar here, though I can’t say what.”

Apull. Yes, she felt that too. But not to the area; she grew up here. Of course it was familiar to her. The thing she felt a pull toward washim. From the moment she first looked at him standing in her entryway, she recognized something in his eyes. And then the visions. None of it made any sense to her, because she’d never met him. Unless there was somethingtrulybizarre going on, and they were living out some wild reincarnation scenario and were lovers from a past life.

Cole gave her a soft, warm look. That soul-searching gaze and flicker of...somethingshe didn’t know what to make of.

Dell ate the remaining bites of her meal in silence. She had had the dish countless times before, both while she’d been perfectingthe recipe and when she was hungry after work and looked for leftovers. She let each forkful melt over her tongue before she swallowed it, savoring the flavor profile and texture the whole way through. The comfort was something that had been missing all day.

“How did you get into cooking?” Cole asked, again watching her with heated interest.

“Working in soup kitchens, actually,” Dell said. “My mom has run and contributed to charities my whole life. I think I was ten or eleven the first time a cook at a kitchen let me help. I fell in love with it. Not only the cooking but also the joy in nourishing people. Getting to see someone enjoy food I made for them fills me with a kind of satisfaction I don’t get from anything else.”

“Is that why you became a chef?”

“Clearly.” She grinned at him. “Alex and Andy were busy building LEGO towers and going to preteen business summer camps—it’s a real thing, believe it or not—and I was writing recipe books and making everyone sample my kitchen experiments.”

“I’m sure they weren’t hard to convince of your career path if you were churning out dishes like that.” He pointed at her near-empty plate.

She was tempted to lick it. “What about your parents? What do you think they were like—Iknowyou can’t remember. But what do you think?”

“That’s one of the things I wish I remembered most. I like to think they were caring. Intelligent.”

“Good-looking,” she chimed in.

He coyly grinned. “Tall, obviously. At least one of them was. I got these genes from somewhere.”

“Maybe they really were a poetry professor and a Jane Austen hero!”

“Unlikely, since I haven’t been dead long enough to have had a father from Mr. Darcy’s era.”

“You really don’t know how it happened? How you... died?” Dell asked.

He shook his head with his lips pressed together. “No.”

A sadness crashed into Dell, and she didn’t know what to make of it, so she made a joke. “Maybe it was something heroic, like saving puppies from a burning building.”

He snorted. “With these hands, I doubt I was a firefighter.” He held up his right hand, and Dell recalled the soft feel of it in hers from earlier.

“Who said anything about a firefighter? You could have been a poetry professor riding his bike home from campus one night, and you saw a burning building and couldn’t help but intervene.”

“Hmm. A heroic, puppy-saving poet. I like it.”

“Hey, look at you! And you said you weren’t good at rhyming.”

“That was a slant rhyme, at best.”

“Jargon. More proof my assessment is accurate.”

“Your lips are starting to turn blue,” he said.

“What?”

Cole pointed at her face. “Your lips. I think your host has probably had enough of this freezer.”

“Oh God,” Dell said, and set her plate back on the shelf. She pressed her hands to her mouth. “You’re right. She’s not used to this cold.”

“Her date might have noticed he’s been ghosted by now too.”