The Sabbath Kitchen

The morning opens before anyone else stirs. Greta stands barefoot on cold linoleum, warming milk in the saucepan that survived the porridge incident of Charles's childhood. She makes hot chocolate — proper cocoa, not the instant powder the boys prefer — and carries two mugs to the lounge. Noah appears with the particular shuffle of a man whose back remembers every engine bay and weekend project. He reaches for the chipped brown mug without looking. They sit together in the hush, Millie twitching through dog dreams by the sliding door, and Greta lets herself feel the accumulated weight and warmth of decades — the chaotic mornings with small children, the sticky hands and bedtime negotiations, and how the silence she once craved has finally arrived, carrying echoes of everything it replaced.

Then the house wakes. Charles's door hits the wall. Jerome's music seeps through the plaster. The cathedral hush dissolves into the familiar Sunday symphony. Greta moves through the hallway and finds Jerome standing before his wardrobe, holding a fistful of ties with the seriousness of a man making a consequential decision. She suggests the navy. He takes her advice with a smile that collapses time — still the toddler with picture books, already the young man choosing his tie for someone he hasn't named. Charles explodes into the corridor, half-dressed and fully opinionated, and immediately targets Jerome's careful grooming with brotherly precision. Greta steps between them with the practised ease of two decades' peacekeeping, redirecting Charles toward his missing socks and leaving Jerome to finish his knot in peace.

The morning settles into its final movement at the stove. The cast-iron pan — Noah's mother's, seasoned by generations — heats on the gas ring. Greta pours batter in slow spirals, watches for the telltale bubbles, flips with a wrist motion she could perform in her sleep. The scent of vanilla and browning butter fills the house like a benediction. Charles materialises at the kitchen threshold, attempting stealth and failing magnificently, angling for first pancake under the guise of quality control. He is redirected toward the plate cupboard and sent to check on Jerome. Greta stands alone at the stove and recognises, in the rhythm of pour and flip and stack, that this is the constant — the thing that has outlasted every difficult week, every shifting season of family life. Not perfect. Not polished. But faithful, and still enough to bring them all to the table.