Sophie has asked me, more times than I deserve, to stop protecting her. Maybe I should stop being so dumb and just listen to her.

“How’s this?” she asks, pulling me out of my head.

She’s piled the pancakes high on the plate; the blueberry coulis I made dribbles down the side. The dish is topped with extra ricotta, whipped and drizzled with a lemon reduction.

“That is...gorgeous.”

She smiles, obviously pleased.

“This is sort of like recipe testing,” I say. “Maybe we should serve Camilla pancakes.”

She rolls her eyes. “We don’t even have a breakfast menu.”

“You can eat breakfast food any time of day.”

She shakes her head. “It has to be something special. Unique. I can’t just throw any dish in front of her,” she says, her voice teetering on a sharp edge.

“Are you nervous?” I ask. “About cooking for a celebrity chef.”

She shrugs, folding and unfolding a dish towel. “Not really.”

Which makes sense. She’s cooked for a celebrity chef before, for eight weeks on Pop-Up Kitchen. “So, it’s just the show in general,” I say. When she doesn’t respond, I ask, “What happened there, Sophie?”

Frost patterns the kitchen windows and she looks there instead of at me. “I thought the show was going to be about food. Cooking. Maybe that was stupid of me.”

“You’re not stupid.”

“Naive, then. But it wasn’t about the food at all. It was about the drama and getting yelled at by the chef and strategizing in order not to get kicked off for another week. When I cook in a restaurant, it’s not about me. It’s about the food. But it feels like it hasn’t been about the food for so long now. Sometimes it feels like it will never be about the food again.”

“It sounds like you lost yourself on that show.”

She looks up at me. Her eyes seem greener when she’s here, surrounded by all my plant babies. “Can we talk about something else?”

My first instinct is to say no. To sit her down and tell her about how obsessed I was with her because of that show, because of her cooking. Her laser focus, her creativity. I can’t reconcile that ferocity with the lost soul in front of me now.

But I’m a new Amy. I’m not bossy anymore. At least, not with her.

“Sure.” I shrug like this is exactly what I want to do, as well. She adjusts the garnish on the plate, and I follow her gaze.

“Where’d you get mint?” I ask, pointing to the sprigs of mint leaf. “And are they...” I squint. “Candied?”

“I sprinkled them in a little sugar. I got it from that plant over there.”

“Ursula?!” I shriek.

Sophie puts the stack of objectively gorgeous pancakes down. “I’m sorry. Is your mint plant named Ursula?”

I turn and transfer the bacon to my plate to hide my red face. “Some studies show that naming plants helps them grow.”

“Was I not supposed to use Ursula’s leaves?”