He'd asked her, weeks earlier, with deliberate casualness, what her grandmother's full basil recipe actually involved.
Elena had answered without suspicion, listing ingredients and steps with the easy enthusiasm she brought to anything connected to her family's heritage, never noticing that Kaito had quietly written everything down, never connecting the question to anything beyond ordinary curiosity.
He'd spent the following weeks, in stolen pockets of time between café shifts and coursework, learning to cook it properly — failing twice, the basil overcooked, the proportions wrong, before finally producing something that, when he'd cautiously tested it himself, tasted close enough to what Elena had described that he felt reasonably confident.
