She is not kidding. Sylvia calls us in a few minutes later, and my eyes widen when I realize how much there is. “Did your mom think all of your friends were coming?” I whisper to Jasmine.

“Oh, no. She went light for just the three of us.”

Jasmine has got to be kidding. After we have wine and round, golden challah studded with seeds, enough food emerges from the kitchen to put the seafood boil to shame. As promised, there’s an incredible lentil soup, and by the time I finish, I’m already half full. But the hits keep coming, and I find I can’t say no—not to the football-shaped kibbeh stuffed with meat and pine nuts, nor to the mini pizza-looking things called lahmajun whose slightly sour taste Jasmine explains to me is the infamous tamarind, nor to the roast chicken spiced with cinnamon.

“I appreciate a girl with a healthy appetite,” Sylvia says with a smile, and I blush. I don’t usually eat that much, but the food is so good and Jasmine keeps encouraging me to “just taste” the stuffed onions and “have one bite” of the flaky bastel. I’d expected the food to be spicy, but it isn’t at all, not in the hot sense. It’s flavorful—more than anything else I’ve ever had in my life.

My mother would hate it.

“I told her you were a great cook,” Jasmine says with no small amount of pride.

“She did.” I take a gulp of water from my glass and notice Sylvia has barely eaten. Jasmine mentioned that too—her mother loves to cook far more than she loves to eat. I selfishly hope that means we’ll be going back with leftovers.

Sylvia pats Jasmine’s hand affectionately, and a wave of missing my mom comes over me. But it’s quickly replaced by the realization that this is Jasmine’s normal. I’m looking at the life she’s coming back to after the summer—the food, the Friday night dinners, the vanity covered in perfume bottles. She won’t be returning to New York with her dad, and none of us will be staying at the beach.

Suddenly, I’m not hungry anymore.

“So, you know I like to cook,” Sylvia says to me. “Tell me, Larissa. What do you do for fun?”

“She’s a writer,” Jasmine says before I can get a word out, definitely knowing I wouldn’t have said a word about it if she didn’t force it. “She’s been writing a book this summer.”

My blush before was nothing compared to the heat level in my cheeks now. “It’s nothing. It’s for fun.”