The Taste of Someone Else

When two people become deeply intimate, each begins tasting the other’s emotions. Pastry chef Sorel Marchetti made a celebrated career from flavoring what nobody else could name: grief, hope, desire, relief.

For years, she has tasted only her wife’s quiet contentment and assumed it was shared. Then unfamiliar notes enter the kitchen: iron fear, medicinal bitterness, salt held carefully beneath sugar.

Her wife is dying and has hidden the truth inside an elaborate grace Sorel mistook for happiness. Knowing may be an unbearable gift or an intimate trespass. Their final dessert will require Sorel to separate what she absorbs from what she chooses to feel.

Love changes flavor when protection begins to taste like concealment.