The Anniversary Dinner

When private chef Miriam accepts a six-month contract at a remote Maine estate, she expects solitude, silence, and the simple work of cooking for one. What she finds is a kitchen that still belongs to someone else.
Every jar label, every copper pot, every page in the row of hand-dated notebooks on the shelf above the cooker — all of it carries the careful hand of Constance, the owners late wife. A woman whose presence lingers in chalk menus half-erased on the kitchen wall, in a physic garden planted with both healing herbs and deadly nightshade, and in a locked drawer no one will explain.
Edgar Lorne is precise, courteous, and utterly private. He says little, notices everything, and speaks of his dead wife in a past tense so natural it unsettles. As Miriam settles into the rhythms of the house — the cliff path above the Atlantic, the housekeepers guarded silences, the typewriter that starts and stops above her head — she begins to understand that she has not been hired to cook.