Alice grabbed a delicious-looking muffin and moved into the living room.  Sitting down on the couch, she looked around Lara’s spacious apartment.  There were pictures of Lara’s family all over the place; in each of them, Lara, her siblings, and her parents looked genuinely happy, showing how close-knit they all were.  The whole place felt homey, Alice thought, settling back on the couch and taking a bite of her muffin.  It felt like Lara: warm, relaxed, comforting.

“Oh my God,” Alice said pleasurably as she chewed.  She had no idea what flavour of muffin it was, but it was fruity and lemony and, as with most of Lara’s cooking, it tasted amazing.      

As Alice continued scanning the apartment from her seat on the couch, a large shelf full of books sitting against a wall caught her attention.  She got up and walked over to it, looking at the titles curiously.  Not surprisingly, there were a large number of cooking books, but there were also a smattering of other books thrown on the shelf in no particular order: modern bestsellers stood beside obscure-looking titles, and historical biographies were mixed in with a wide collection of classics.  Lara is obviously a bookworm, Alice thought, smiling as she picked up a well-worn copy of Wuthering Heights. 

As she was flipping through it, she looked at another shelf and stopped, staring.  Two books had caught her attention; one was a guidebook for Paris, and the other was the prospectus for Lara’s upcoming chef’s course.  Alice had an indescribable urge to read the prospectus, but she couldn’t bring herself to look at the life that Lara might soon be living without her in it.  She stood immovably for a few moments, her heart beating hard in her chest.  Then, she quickly changed into the still-damp clothes she had worn on the walk in the rain from Milk the night before, and left the apartment.

***

“Lara, I think you can stop chopping now,” Kit said, coming over to the prep corner of the kitchen at The Planet and startling the redhead out of her reverie.  Lara looked down and realised that she had chopped up most of the cucumbers in the kitchen.  Mounds of them were piled all around her station.  Deeply involved in her thoughts about her encounter with Alice the night before, she hadn’t been paying attention to what she was doing.