4338.206 · July 25, 2018 AD
Butter to the Edges
The accusations from an earlier phone call still sit heavy in the quiet of the house, but Greta does what she has always done — she cooks. Pumpkin soup with rosemary tucked like a secret beneath the wedges. Toasties pressed to golden crispness. Her mother's rhubarb crumble, following a recipe card yellowed with decades of flour-dusted hands. Every gesture is devotion disguised as routine, every adjusted placemat a small act of defiance against a day that has offered no answers. The table is set. The food is ready. Whether anyone will come is another matter entirely.
An evening kitchen in the Adelaide Hills becomes the quiet centre of a woman's faith — not the thunderclap kind, but the kind that expresses itself in butter spread to the edges and soup ladled with care. Greta moves through the rituals of meal preparation with the muscle memory of decades, each step a small act of order in a day that has shaken her more than she will say aloud. Claire's phone call lingers beneath every surface — the accusations, the desperation, the unanswered question of where Paul is — but the kitchen is where Greta has always taken her worry and kneaded it into something manageable. The crumble follows her mother's recipe. The soup carries rosemary like a quiet afterthought. The dog waits at the glass door with a patience that mirrors her own. And as the Adelaide sky darkens and the table sits empty past six o'clock, the gap between the offering and the response becomes the chapter's central weight — a woman who has prepared everything she can, holding still in the space where love meets silence.
