The morning sun caught the copper pots hanging from the makeshift trellis, sending coins of light dancing across the terra-cotta tiles. Amelie Bonnet crushed fresh thyme between her fingers, releasing its sharp perfume into the air above the rooftop garden. Below, the Marais district stirred awake, all narrow streets and shuttered windows, but up here, four stories above the bakeries and boutiques, she had built something impossible—a kitchen in the sky.

"You're early," she said without turning around.

Luc Moreau climbed the last iron rung of the ladder, slightly breathless. "I couldn't sleep. Kept thinking about that beurre noisette you mentioned."

She allowed herself a small smile. For three weeks now, he'd been showing up to these illegal cooking lessons, this gentle man with paint-stained fingers who'd answered her cryptic notice in the building's foyer. *Learn the old ways. Rooftop. Tuesdays and Thursdays. Tell no one.* Twelve neighbors had come that first morning. Now, only Luc remained consistent, eager, asking questions that showed he actually understood what happened when butter transformed from gold to hazelnut brown.

"It's all about patience," Amelie said, setting her brass burner on the wooden table she'd salvaged from a flea market. "The moment before it burns—that's when it sings."

Luc tied on the apron she kept for him, faded blue cotton that had once belonged to her grandmother. "Like life, then. Everything good happens right at the edge."

She glanced at him sharply. He had a poet's way of speaking that unsettled her, made her forget she was supposed to remain invisible. Six months since the review that destroyed her bistro, since she'd become a ghost in her own city, and this man made her want to be seen again.

The butter melted in the pan, and she showed him how to watch for the milk solids, how to listen for the change in sizzle. His shoulder brushed hers as he leaned close, and she caught the scent of linseed oil and coffee.

"You paint?" she asked.

"Restoration work. Old buildings, frescoes. I bring dead things back to life." He smiled. "Or try to."

"Is that why you come here? To resurrect something?"

His eyes met hers, gray as the slate rooftops stretching toward Sacré-Cœur. "Maybe I just wanted to learn from the best."

She turned back to the pan quickly, her throat tight. "The best don't lose their restaurants."

"The best don't let one critic define them."

The words hung between them like smoke. Amelie's hand trembled slightly as she swirled the pan, watching the butter cascade into nutty darkness. "That critic knew what he was doing. Every word was a knife, precisely placed."

"Maybe he didn't understand what he was destroying."

"Oh, he understood. He called my cassoulet 'aggressively rustic.' Said my coq au vin belonged in a 'provincial nursing home, not a Paris bistro.' He—" She stopped, realizing she'd memorized every venomous phrase. "He said I was serving nostalgia for a France that never existed."

Luc was quiet for a long moment. Too quiet. When Amelie looked up, his face had gone pale.

"Amelie," he said softly. "Amelie Bonnet. You're *that* Amelie Bonnet."

The world tilted. "What?"

"La Mère Poule. Your bistro." He ran his hand through his dark hair, and she saw it now—the intelligence in those eyes, the way he'd been watching her, cataloging her techniques. "Mon Dieu. I didn't connect it until just now."

"Connect what?" But her heart already knew, was already falling through the floor of this impossible rooftop.

"I write for Le Quotidien. Food criticism. Under a pseudonym." His voice cracked. "I wrote that review."

The pan slipped from her fingers, clattering against the tile. Burned butter spread in a dark stain between them.

"Get out."

"Amelie, please—"

"Get. Out." Her voice shook with fury, with betrayal so sharp it stole her breath. "You came here, to *my* rooftop, you let me teach you—was this some kind of joke? Research for another clever evisceration?"

"No! I didn't know it was you. I live in this building. I saw the notice, I was curious—" He reached for her, and she jerked away. "I came back because you're brilliant. Because everything you do with food is what I've been trying to write about for years but kept getting wrong."

"You destroyed me." The words came out broken.

"I destroyed a meal. One meal, Amelie. I was young and arrogant and trying to prove I had sophisticated taste, that I could spot pretension." His eyes glistened. "But I didn't understand. That cassoulet—your grandmother's recipe?"

She nodded, unable to speak.

"I grew up eating instant noodles and frozen pizza. My parents worked three jobs between them. I taught myself about food from books, from restaurants where I didn't belong, always performing sophistication." He stepped closer, and she didn't move away. "I didn't recognize love on a plate because I'd never been fed by someone who cooked with their whole heart."

Amelie looked at the ruined butter spreading across her grandmother's tiles. She thought about the bistro, the emptiness after, the shame. But she also thought about Luc's questions these past weeks, the way he'd listened when she talked about her grandmother's kitchen in Lyon, how his hands had trembled the first time she'd let him taste her pot-au-feu.

"You can't fix this," she whispered.

"I know. But let me try." He knelt, began cleaning the spilled butter with his apron. "I'll write a retraction. I'll tell everyone I was wrong."

"That won't bring back my bistro."

"No." He looked up at her, and she saw genuine pain in his face. "But maybe, if you'll let me, I can help you build something new. Not a critic and a chef. Just two people who understand that the best meals come from the edge of burning."

Above them, clouds drifted past the Eiffel Tower's iron lattice. A pigeon landed on the trellis, cooing softly. Amelie studied this man who'd wounded her, who'd returned to her unknowingly, who'd learned to see what he'd once dismissed.

She picked up a fresh pat of butter, set it in a clean pan. "Then watch carefully. I'm only going to show you this once more."

His smile broke like dawn over the rooftops. "I won't miss a moment."

As the butter began to melt, turning from solid to liquid gold, Amelie felt something in her chest soften too—not forgiveness, not yet, but perhaps the beginning of something equally transformative. Something that lived, like all the best flavors, right at the edge of destruction and transcendence.