Mustard and Love 5

Isabella finished cleaning the counters and looked around with pride. This fine kitchen with its racks and racks of spices and equipment was all hers. She had had a great first day on her new job, but now she was looking forward to pick Tony up from the babysitter and get home. She locked the kitchen behind her, waved a cheery good-bye to Phyllis, and left with a spring in her step.

Outside, the sun was low in the sky, and the shadows were long. Still looking at the horizon, she turned, and almost collided with Brett, the stranger from this morning.

Brett stepped back, surprise in his eyes. “Oh, it’s you. Seems like we keep bumping into each other.”

“I’m so sorry. I was watching the sunset.”

Brett grinned. His white teeth shone in the dusk. “Don’t worry about it. This time I’ll take the blame.”

Isabella had to laugh. “What a gentleman you are. I don’t really deserve this.”

“Isabella, a woman as gorgeous as you is never at fault.” He searched her face. “But on a more serious note, I kept wondering why your name is so familiar, and just as you bumped into me, I remembered. Aren’t you Fernando Miguel Rivera’s girlfriend?”

Isabella’s heart seemed to stand still. Just hearing his name opened the old wound in her heart. “How do you know Fernando?”

“He used to be my roommate in medical school. Fernando always talked about you. He was so in love with you.”

Some kind of love that was. A love that allows him to up and leave us, Isabella thought. A week after he disappeared, when she had come home from school, all his things were gone, too. It seemed as if he was too much of a coward to face her and tell her he wanted out. However, in spite of what everyone told her, she had held fast to the thought that something really bad must have happened to him. Even now she only half believed that he had really walked out on her and Tony.

But that was neither here nor there. She gripped her purse tighter and started walking toward the parking lot. “I’m sorry. I need to get home.”

She reached her car, Brett still by her side. “Whatever happened to Fernando? Are you two still together? Did he finish that fantastic research he was working on? I believe it had something to do with mustard.”

Isabella sighed inwardly. That had been part of the reason she had made such an effort to be hired on at the Spice Experience. Maybe Brett had known Fernando well enough to help her make sense out of his disappearance. She thought Fernando had been happy with his small family. Even now, three years later, she still wondered what had happened that made him leave her and his son.

She unlocked her Toyota. “My son is waiting. I really need to go.”

“Maybe we can meet later, just to talk?” Brett gave her such a hopeful smile that her heart grew lighter.

“Well, okay,” she said. “How about in two hours at the café across from the museum. But just for a little while, to talk about Fernando.”

“That sounds wonderful. I’ll see you then.”

Isabella slid into the driver’s seat, her mind on Fernando once more, and her heart in an uproar.