He made it sound like a choice. My choice. No pressure.

I smiled, suddenly light. Free. “Let’s see if you can keep up.”

I took off.

I heard the air escape his lungs—a gust of surprise or laughter—and then his shoes striking the path. For a big man, he was quick. The frantic pace of the kitchen, the constant cries of Hot! and Behind!, must have honed his reflexes. He caught up to me easily.

For a while we ran in tandem. Maybe I slowed down a little. Or maybe he adjusted his stride, matching his steps to mine. I snuck a look at his profile. He wasn’t even breathing hard. I wasn’t at race pace, but . . .

“How’s your family? Your mother?” I heard myself ask.

His eyes did that crinkle thing, as if he found me amusing, but he answered politely. “She is fine, thank you. She and my father are spending the holidays with my sister in Frankfurt.”

Ooh, a personal detail.

“You think when I was training that I went home to my mother every night?” he had asked me. “That I asked for weekends and holidays off?”

“I guess you won’t be joining them,” I said.

“Not this year. I will miss seeing them, of course. But Germany is not home for me. We were military.” A quick glance. “You understand.”

“Kind of. I mean, I get the whole military-culture thing. You must have felt it even more in a foreign country. But our family never had to move, except to the farm. We always had ties to the community.”

To the land.

“Roots,” Chef said, as if he could read my mind.

“Yeah.”

Our feet pounded, side by side. Our breath puffed, intermingling in the cold air. I hadn’t had a running partner since my cross-country days. I’d always liked running alone, with no one to measure against but myself. But running created an instant intimacy. Shared sweat or something.

“My mother says the farm is our heritage,” I said. “But I couldn’t wait to leave Bunyan. I always felt . . .” Too bookish, too stubborn, too ambitious, too competitive. “Like I didn’t belong.”

“Ah. In Germany, I was a mischlingskinder. Mixed race,” he explained. “It is a term from the Second World War, when American GIs had brown babies with German women. The prejudice is not so bad as it was a generation ago, but . . .” He shrugged his big shoulders.

Not protesting the unfairness of it all. Just . . . sharing his feelings with me. As if I were somehow worthy of his confidence.

“There’s prejudice here, too.” Like he needed me to point that out. My hot face got hotter.

“Yes,” he said simply. “But my roots are here, too. My boys are here.”

His sons, I remembered, living with their mother near Fort Bragg.

I wondered how he’d met his ex-wife. How long had they been together? When did they get divorced? I wanted to know him better, beyond the bare facts of a Google search or the speculation in the kitchen. What was he looking for? But we didn’t have the kind of relationship that I could ask.