The morning air had the particular crispness of a Friday that hadn't decided yet whether it wanted to be warm.
Sky was on his phone before we'd even reached the bottom of the stairs, scrolling through something with the focused frown he usually reserved for things that mattered to him in ways he didn't always articulate clearly.
"Quick question," he said, not looking up. "When you registered for classes — back when all of that got sorted out — which supplementary class did you pick?"
I thought about it. "I don't know what that is."
He looked up properly then, surprised. "You don't know what a supplementary class is."
"I genuinely do not."
"They're the extra classes at the end of the month. Community stuff, mostly — gives you something practical to put toward your final grade. Environmental work, picking up litter around the river path, watering the greenhouse, that kind of thing. Some people do tutoring for younger students. Some people do the kitchen rotation for the children's home programme." He pocketed his phone. "Most people pick whatever they're already decent at. I did pottery, which in hindsight was a mistake, because I am extremely bad at pottery and the instructor has stopped pretending otherwise."
"I got sponsored in," I said slowly. "I don't think I actually filled in half that paperwork myself."
Sky's eyebrows went up. "You don't know what you're signed up for?"
"No."
"That's either very relaxing or deeply alarming and I can't decide which."
We detoured to the administration office before first period, where a tired-looking woman behind the desk pulled up my file, squinted at the screen, and read out a single line without much ceremony.
"Cooking," she said. "Children's Home Culinary Programme. Friday afternoons."
Sky made a small, satisfied sound beside me.
"At least it's not pottery," he said, as we walked out. "Pottery is humbling in ways nobody warns you about." A pause, and then something shifted across his face — a half-formed thought catching up to him. "Wait. Isn't Bella in that one?"
I hadn't actually known that, but the moment he said it, it made an uncomfortable amount of sense.
I thought, briefly and without much surprise, that this had probably not been an accident.
The kitchen classroom smelled like flour and something warm even before the lesson started — long steel counters, a row of ovens against the far wall, the particular organised chaos of a space built for people to actually use rather than simply look at.
I arrived a few minutes early and found myself standing near the equipment racks, not entirely sure where I was supposed to be, when two girls drifted over with the easy confidence of people who'd already decided how this conversation was going to go.
"You're the new guy, right?" one of them asked. "Marx?"
"That's me."
"Want to pair up?" the other said, already glancing toward an empty station. "We're pretty good. We did this last term."
I opened my mouth to answer, and that was the exact moment something closed around my wrist and pulled.
Not roughly. Just decisively.
Bella.
She didn't say anything to the girls directly — didn't need to. Her presence alone did the work, the particular quiet authority she carried into any room without trying. The two girls exchanged a glance, recalibrated something unspoken, and drifted toward a different station without further comment.
"I work better with someone I'm already familiar with," Bella said, releasing my wrist and steering us toward an empty counter.
"Efficient excuse."
"It's not an excuse. It's logistics." She started laying out ingredients with her usual economy. "We already know how to work around each other. That matters more than enthusiasm."
I leaned against the counter, watching her organise things into an order only she fully understood yet. "You could put your special knockout ingredient in today," I said. "For old times' sake."
"I could."
"I'd appreciate the warning this time."
"You wouldn't get one. That's the entire point." She glanced at me, something dry in her expression. "Thank you, by the way. For pointing out it's been a while since I poisoned you."
"I was going to thank you, actually. For finally stopping."
"Who said I stopped?" She didn't even look up from the cutting board. "Someone just adapted."
I stared at her.
She let the silence sit for exactly long enough to be satisfying, then glanced over with the faintest curve at the corner of her mouth — the almost-smile, fully deployed, fully aware of its own effect.
I was still working out whether to be impressed or concerned when the instructor — a warm, broad-shouldered woman named Ms. Adeyemi who ran the kitchen with the unhurried confidence of someone who'd been doing this for two decades — called the room to attention.
"Listen up," she said. "Knife safety, heat safety, and the schedule for today. Everything we make goes to Brightwell Children's Home this afternoon, so I expect care, not chaos. Pair up, and let's get moving."
She ran through the safety points with practiced efficiency, then set us loose on the day's menu — a simple, hearty stew with rice, the kind of food built to travel well and feed a lot of people without complication.
Bella and I fell into rhythm almost immediately.
She chopped. I stirred. We swapped tasks without discussing it, the same unspoken coordination I'd gotten used to in far more dangerous kitchens than this one. At one point I added the spices slightly too early and she caught my wrist before I could compound the mistake, redirecting me with the patient firmness of someone who'd clearly done this with worse cooks than me.
"You're better at chopping than I expected," she said, at one point.
"High praise."
"Don't get used to it."
I laughed — actually laughed, the easy kind, the kind that had become rarer over the past few days and felt good to find again. She didn't laugh back, but something in her shoulders loosened, the same loosening I'd seen the night before when I'd asked about the jollof rice.
As we were plating the last batch, sealing containers with the careful precision Ms. Adeyemi had drilled into us, I asked the question that had been sitting at the back of my mind since Sky mentioned she was in this class.
"Did TRAD sign you up for this?"
Bella looked up, genuinely surprised by the question. "No."
"You picked it yourself."
"I did." She sealed another container, set it in the crate. "I like going with Ms. Adeyemi to the home. The kids—" she paused, like she was deciding how much of this to say out loud "—they don't know anything about who I am outside that room. To them I'm just the person who shows up with food and lets them help stir things even when they shouldn't be allowed near hot pans." A small, private smile. "It's the only place I go where nobody expects anything from me except patience."
I looked at her for a long moment.
It was the most unguarded thing she'd said to me in weeks.
"That's a good reason," I said.
"I know." She closed the last container. "Come on. Help me load the van."
The drive to Brightwell took twenty minutes, and by the time we arrived, my arms ached pleasantly from carrying crates and my collar smelled faintly of stew, which felt, oddly, like a good way to smell.
The home itself was modest — a low building with a wide, scrubby garden out front and the particular cheerful shabbiness of a place that had more love in it than money. Children spilled out the front door almost the moment the van pulled up, drawn by the smell before anyone had even opened the back doors properly.
Bella moved among them like she'd done this a hundred times, because she had. She crouched to their height without making a show of it, let a small girl direct her toward exactly where the bowls needed to go, fielded three separate requests to be picked up with the calm patience of someone who genuinely didn't mind any of it.
I stood near the van for a moment, slightly out of my depth, until a boy of about seven attached himself to my leg with the directness only children manage and asked, with great seriousness, whether I could lift him onto my shoulders to see over the fence.
I could. I did.
After that it became easier — passing out bowls, answering increasingly elaborate questions about whether I knew any superheroes personally, getting roped into a game whose rules seemed to change every time I asked for clarification. I caught Bella watching at one point, amusement evident even from across the yard, and gave her a helpless shrug that made her laugh — properly, audibly, a sound I didn't think I'd heard from her before.
As we were preparing to leave, packing the empty crates back into the van, a small boy — one of the quieter ones, who'd spent most of the afternoon watching from the edges before working up the courage to approach — tugged at my sleeve.
He held out something small and slightly lopsided. A necklace, clearly homemade, beads threaded onto string in a pattern that had probably made more sense in his head than it did in execution.
"For your girlfriend," he whispered, pointing toward Bella, who was loading the last crate and entirely unaware of the exchange.
Then he giggled and bolted before I could correct him or thank him properly.
I looked down at the necklace in my hand.
I didn't correct it. There wasn't really a clean way to.
We walked back from the van drop-off point together, the late afternoon sun doing the particular gold thing it did over Annex City when the day was winding down well. Bella was talking about one of the older kids, a girl who'd apparently asked extremely specific questions about knife technique that suggested either a future chef or future concerns Bella was choosing not to dwell on.
"She's eight," Bella said. "And she asked me why I cut the onions that way instead of the way her teacher showed her. Then she demonstrated her teacher's way. Which was wrong, for the record."
"You corrected an eight-year-old's onion technique."
"Gently."
"There's no gentle way to correct someone's onion technique."
"There's always a gentle way." She glanced at me. "You're better with kids than I expected."
"High praise."
"Don't get used to it," she said, echoing herself from earlier, and the corner of her mouth did the thing again.
I reached into my pocket.
"Here," I said, holding out the lopsided necklace.
She looked at it. Then at me. "What's this?"
"A kid gave it to me. Said to give it to my girlfriend." I shrugged, keeping my voice light, even as something in my chest did something complicated. "I figured that was you, by process of elimination."
She studied the necklace for a moment longer than the joke probably warranted. Then, without comment, she turned around and gathered her hair to one side, presenting the back of her neck.
I blinked.
"Well?" she said. "Put it on."
I did, fingers slightly less steady than I would have liked, fumbling the small clasp for a second before it caught. She turned back around, the beads sitting slightly crooked against her collarbone, looking entirely unbothered by how clearly handmade it was.
"There," she said. "Now I'm officially someone's pretend girlfriend by an eight-year-old's decree."
"It's a binding contract."
"Apparently." She started walking again. "Which means, since you've made me cocky enough to accept costume jewellery from children, dinner tonight gets the extra ingredient. The real one this time."
"That feels disproportionate."
"It's proportionate to the crime."
"What crime?"
"Existing smugly while I willingly let a small child believe I'm your girlfriend." She didn't look at me, but the almost-smile was very much present in her voice. "Walk faster. I have cooking to ruin."
"You mean improve."
"I mean ruin, specifically for you."
I laughed, and the sound carried easily into the warm evening air, and we walked the rest of the way back together, the lopsided necklace catching the last of the sunlight against her collarbone, and for one unguarded stretch of road, nothing about the day felt complicated at all.