Once she was seated, Ben brought the first dish himself: a steaming bowl of celery root soup with fresh-baked bread.
“You cooked for me once,” he said quietly. “Now it’s my turn.”
They ate, and between bites, he began to speak to her—and to the room.
“When I was nineteen, I lived in a run-down building, broke and hungry. One snowy night, my groceries spilled in the street. Charlotte called me inside, gave me soup, and taught me how to turn scraps into something worth eating. She kept me fed for weeks and pushed me to apply for culinary school. She even gave me the little savings she had.”
He glanced at her with a small smile. “You told me to pay it forward. Tonight, I start paying it back.”
