The flat smelled of garlic, chopped onions, and hot olive oil.
Luke was at the induction cooktop with a wide cast-iron skillet, sleeves pushed past his forearms, stirring diced chicken with a wooden spoon. The rhythmic scrape of wood against seasoned iron had settled into the kitchen half an hour ago, unhurried and steady.
I sat on the stool at the quartz island, my tea cooling in its mug beside a small breadboard, a pair of tweezers, and the multi-spectral sensor we’d bought Saturday.
The white cardboard box sat open by the napkin holder. I had the casing off, four jumper leads soldered to the I2C pads, running them into a USB interface plugged into my secondary laptop.
"Surface temperature of the rear burner is four hundred and twelve degrees," NELL announced from the ceiling grille. "The garlic will reach critical scorch threshold in twenty-two seconds."
Luke didn't look up from the stove. He slid the skillet off the center of the element with his left hand and reached straight into the upper cabinet with his right, his fingers closing around the smoked paprika without checking the label.
"Thanks, NELL," he said.
"You are welcome, Luke," the ceiling answered, flat and even. "The adjustment is adequate."
"See?" Luke glanced over his shoulder at me, shaking two red clouds of spice into the sizzling pan. "Coexistence."
"She's babysitting your burner," I said, clipping a ground wire to the board.
"She's collaborating."
I laughed under my breath, adjusting the sample rate on the serial terminal.
The sensor didn't have a fault; it didn't have a broken capacitor or a phantom tremor. It was simply an industrial optical monitor sitting on my kitchen counter, measuring ambient lumens and particulate drift from Luke’s skillet in tiny, scrolling columns of hexadecimal. It was completely unnecessary for a two-bedroom flat. That was the entire point.
"Five minutes on the rice," Luke called out, pulling a bag of chopped greens from the bottom shelf of the fridge. "Grab bowls?"
"Already on it."
I unhooked the leads, closed the laptop lid halfway, and slid off the stool.
The cupboards opened under my hands out of twenty years of habit. Two deep ceramic bowls, two forks, paper napkins off the roll.
Luke brought the skillet over to the island and ladled the chicken, rice, and peppers into both dishes. He set the skillet on a silicone trivet, tossed the spoon into the sink, and pulled out the stool across from mine.
"How's the spectrum?" he asked, taking his fork.
"Sixty percent amber," I said, pulling my bowl closer. "Your paprika is throwing off the light balance."
"Tragic," he said around a mouthful of rice.
"Unacceptable data corruption."
We ate across the quartz counter while the evening traffic on the street below drifted through the half-open window.
Luke had his ankle hooked around the leg of his stool, his thumb absently tracing a line along the handle of his fork as he chewed. He looked comfortable under the overhead LEDs, unhurried and solid, like he’d always known where everything was.
I stopped with my fork halfway to the bowl and watched him.
The way his hair curled slightly near his temples, the faint mark of grease near his thumb from his morning shop shift, the steady, unbothered way he occupied the space between my counter and my hallway.
Luke looked up.
He caught me staring, his brow lifting slightly. His hazel eyes crinkled at the corners, and his mouth tipped up in a soft, crooked smile.
"What?" he asked, his voice low.
I set my fork down on the rim of the bowl and smiled back.
"Nothing."
Outside, the streetlights clicked on against the gray evening. The toaster glowed standby amber on the counter. The sensor scrolled numbers into the dark screen of my laptop.
Everything was working as intended.