Sweet Romance12 min read
I Was Told I Was Finished—So I Bought a Farm and a Restaurant Recipe
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"I refuse to starve," I said, folding the ugly divorce paper until it cracked.
I shoved the paper into the dirt, spit once, and laughed like a fool.
Someone had left me in the ruined shrine at the edge of the village and called it an end. My uncle's wife hit me. My so-called husband signed his name and walked away. They all thought they were done with me.
"Done with you?" I asked the empty room. "Nope. Not today."
A thin man with bad habits—Pablo Ahmad, everyone called him "the lazy dog"—peeked through the shrine doorway at dusk, scratching at his beard.
"Gabriela," he said with a grin like a weasel. "You here? I brought bread."
"Keep it," I said. "Bread with your company makes me sick."
He blinked. "Aha. Tough talk for someone who has no roof."
"You should try it," I said, meaning the roof. "It keeps the rain off."
He scuffled away squealing about some village ghost story, and that was that. The night came in cold, my stomach loud as a drum.
I knelt before the crooked mountain god statue and put the stale bun on the altar.
"Mountain god," I told the statue. "If you're real, give me one thing: food. If you aren't real, at least the bread won't argue with me."
I ate in the dark, watched the river wind silver through the reeds, and cursed the life I inherited. I had memories that were not mine—of a life in another time where I was pampered and foolish and loved the wrong man. I remembered the mistakes that belonged to her, the woman whose body I now lived in. I remembered the day she was pushed out and left for dead. I remembered drowning.
I woke somewhere impossible.
The sky was blue like the ribbon on a gift. There was a wooden cabin, a clear stream, and a field not yet tamed. In the cabin sat a tall screen with four bright letters: WELCOME, OWNER.
"Owner?" I mouthed.
A small cartoon dog popped on the screen and barked in tiny text that scrolled like a song: "Hello, Master! I am Kaka, your farm steward."
"Steward," I said. "Farm steward for whom?"
"For you," Kaka said like it was obvious.
I clicked and the screen answered me back in cheerful tones. The place was a space—my space—an upgradeable farm-space that reacted when I thought. A thousand square meters, a wooden shack, a stream with warm, bright water. A hundred square meters of earth waiting.
"Sign the contract?" Kaka asked.
I signed without reading, because when a broken woman gets a second chance she knows better than to be picky.
"You're the farm owner now," Kaka chirped. "Begin your tasks."
I began. I tilled with my hands until my palms burned. I planted grain and cabbage, and the screen sang in green letters. Every time I followed Kaka's little prompts—tend, water, harvest—the world answered. Each time the farm refreshed, the shrine at village edge shimmered and I snapped back, fingers muddy, breath held, a human mess again.
That first week I did everything stupidly and with stubbornness.
I walked into town with fish in a wooden basket, my face still raw from days of hard water and harder nights.
"Gabriela!" they called from a passing cart. Laughter came like rain. "There she goes—divorced, discarded, living at the shrine."
"Stay away," I said to the cart. I kept walking.
The town market smelled of oil and smoke and a thousand small lives. I tried every stall, all the doors, but the village and the town had both written me as an article in their mouths.
"Don't bother," the innkeeper said, shutting his doors to me like a wallet.
I thought of the ragged bread I had left at the altar and Kaka's cheerful face on the screen and did what desperate people do: I offered a demonstration.
"Let me cook a single dish," I told the inn's cook. "If you like it, you pay. If you don't, I give you the fish for free."
The cook stared. The owner, Cassius Lindgren, had come by by chance—a pale, quiet man who moved like someone who knew how to make people calm.
Cassius lifted a taste and said nothing for a long beat. Then he smiled the tiniest smile.
"Bring it back," Cassius said.
I had never expected kindness from one I had always seen as a stranger. But he tasted my stew and his brow smoothed and his hand hovered above the bowl as if not to break something fragile.
"You made this?" Cassius asked.
"Yes," I said. "I can do more."
He did something unexpected: he offered me a deal.
"Teach my kitchen," he said. "One month. If the town likes the food, we buy fish from you. Exclusive for three years."
"Three years?" I repeated, eyes bright. Kaka would be furious if he heard me bragging to the sky, but I whispered, "Yes."
"Why help me?" I asked once the contract was signed.
He shrugged. "You're not what the gossip says. You cook like someone who knows hunger. I like that honesty."
We shook on it. That moment felt like a door opening.
They called the dish "Gabriela's fish" and the inn filled. People who once spat at me now emptied bowls. My small kitchen miracles—water-boiled fish, spiced offal, cabbage fried until it tasted of home—moved people. The kitchen boys called me teacher and I loved the sound. Cassius watched quietly from the second floor. Sometimes he'd come down and look at the pot, like a boy checking if his coin had been well spent.
"Don't let them change you," he said once, handing me a small wrapped parcel.
"What is it?" I asked, palms smelling of oil.
"A scarf," he said. "Winter will be harsh. Keep it."
His fingers brushed mine and I felt something hot and sharp and tender.
"Thanks," I said too fast.
The town grew into my work. The space grew into my secret. Kaka guided me like a stern little friend, telling me to plant, to diversify, to build a root cellar. My second harvest brought grain and cabbages doubled. In the space I could coax fish to fatten in sparkling warm water that did not freeze. I could plant wheat that would feed more mouths. I began to plan.
But the village could not be bought with bread alone.
They wanted stories. They wanted excuses to be cruel.
One morning at the river, three women who had always leaned into cruelty—High Ma, Widow Wang, and Cow Wife—spat at me from the cart shade. "You bought land. You bought a temple. What a laugh! Who does she think she is?"
I answered the only way I knew how.
"Stop talking about me behind my back," I said. "Say it to my face."
High Ma laughed until her voice broke. "We will tell the magistrate," she said, and her eyes gleamed with vengeful pride.
"Go," I said. I was a small, broken thing once. Not anymore.
I slapped High Ma before reason could do it for me. The slap landed like a bell. People froze. The women cried and accused and promised the county magistrate. They wanted me shamed, jailed—anything to erase what they couldn't understand.
"Report me," I told them. "Tell the magistrate who came first. Tell him who sold me fish and whose bowls are full."
They crowded and gossiped and pointed to me. I picked up a handful of copper and tossed it into the small ring of faces.
"Pay a tea for everyone," I said. "If you're going to watch, at least be awake."
I left before they could call a guard. Cassius laughed the next day when he heard the story, but not cruelly. He laughed like someone who liked that I had fire.
"A bold woman," he said when we were alone. "Dangerous. I like dangerous."
"That's not a compliment," I said, laughing until I swallowed a cough.
I learned to be dangerous at the right moment. I learned to be gentle the rest of the time.
A bigger danger came from the inside: Kamilah Clemons, the woman who had raised the girl whose life I wore now. She came to my door with a smile like a blade.
"Gabriela," she said, voice syrup. "You bought the shrine. You bought the land. How generous to be back."
"You're all wet," I said. "Come in for stew."
Her face shuddered. She had been the woman who taught me to bow and to lie. She had been the hand that pushed the other girl into bed with men and then scolded when the world turned ugly.
"I brought my son a match," she said, like an accusation and an offer at the same time.
"Sorry," I said. "I don't take handouts."
She tried to smile. She tried to bargain and bully and buy. When her smile lost its teeth, she begged. I watched the lines in her face change like paper folding.
"So you will keep what's yours," she begged, voice raw. "I just want to help my family."
"Your family bought my silence and sold my childhood," I said. "You taught her to be mean because it profited you. You taught her to use people. You would have sold us all if you could."
There was a beat where she stared like a woman waiting for thunder. Then I did something small and criminally satisfying: I told her the shrine was watched by the mountain god.
"Do you remember the night ten years ago?" I asked. "Do you remember the song the temple sounded? Do you remember how the cows lowed?"
She backed up as if I'd lit a match. She knelt and begged like someone who had been caught in a play she could not direct.
"I will tell everyone," she rasped.
"Then you will tell everyone," I said. "Tell them what you did for coin. Tell them how you taught her to be worthless."
She fled. The village found her story tastier than gossip and the knife of truth cut deeper than any market mockery. She lost face. She lost pride. For a week people watched her like a show and recorded it with their hands and tongues.
I did not dance on her ruin. I sat quietly as her world cracked.
"Why did you do it?" Cassius asked me later, when we were alone and the small stove hissed.
"Because I could," I said. "I was given a tool. I had a farm and a kitchen and a chance to keep a promise to be better."
"You shouldn't have to hurt," he said.
"I didn't hurt," I said. "Truth hurt her pride. She chose pride over family."
He watched me with an intensity that made me drop the ladle and laugh at myself.
"You always laugh like that," he said softly.
"You always watch like that," I said back. We were both easily pleased.
Business grew. The inn wore my dishes like a badge and the menu spread. Cassius began to take me to the market as an ally, not a charity. He walked beside me through the stalls, his hand close enough that sometimes my fingers brushed his.
"Do you ever want anything else?" he asked once as we walked back to the inn at dusk, clouds red like a closed book.
"Food," I said. "And a home that smells of my cooking."
He turned to me. No crowd, no witnesses, only the smell of frying oil and the low chord of his breath.
"Then let's make one," he said. "Not for the town. For us. We have a shop contract, a farm, and a winter coming. Let me help."
I wanted to say yes and say no and say everything at once. My life had taught me to bargain. My heart learned to gamble.
"Will it be different?" I asked.
"It will," he said. "I will be clumsy and kind, and you will be brilliant and loud, and we will be terrible together."
I laughed. "Terrible together. I like that."
We worked. I taught his cooks how to coax flavor from bones and gifts of salt. He taught me how to read a ledger and walk through a room like someone who belonged in it. We shared small breakfasts and quiet nights. He wore his shoes with care and my hands had roughness that steadied him.
"I made a contract," he said, one night when the wind cut like an honest knife. "Not only for the inn. The town council wants to use our recipe for the winter festival. We can make the farm bigger. We can hire more hands."
"More hands," I repeated. "You mean wages and steady work?"
"Yes," he said. "You want to pay fairly, and I want to run an honest house."
We hired people. We dug through the five acres I had bought like we had fought for it and won. High Ma and the other women watched from the kitchen door. They had mouths, but less bite. People who had once spat now ate and smiled sheepishly. The children who had mocked me before were taught what it meant to be fed and fed well.
One night, a group of men came from the reeds: they were small thieves who had taken to stealing any brimming basket on the way to town. They thought the field would be ripe for the taking.
Pablo Ahmad, the lazy dog who used to hiss hunger into my sleeping hours, came first with a gang.
"Give us the fish," he said in a voice made of rotten courage.
"You will beg," I said.
He laughed and grabbed the basket. I stepped forward and knocked him down the way that opens jaws and shuts mouths. The kitchen boys cheered and Cassius took his place beside me, hand to shoulder.
"Do not ever touch her again," Cassius said, eyes like a furnace.
Pablo scrambled, cried, and ran. The others followed. They were humiliated in a public way. People saw it. Kamilah watched from behind a cooking pot and had no place to hide. She had lost something more than money: she had lost the story she used to tell to cover her greed.
Over time the farm became a place of business and a place of healing. The small wooden house gained a second floor. The cellar held jars and bones and hope. Kaka, the cartoon dog, became a sarcastic little friend who nagged me about schedules. I named the farm "Moonridge" in a game of flirtation with Kaka. He barked and flashed fireworks on the screen.
Cassius and I fell into a rhythm that felt like a secret we shared with a world that had once shut us out. He was patient. I was not.
One winter night when snow came early and quiet, I stood by the kitchen stove and Cassius came up behind me, wrapping the scarf he'd given me around my neck again.
"You used to wrap yourself in other people's things," he said.
"Not anymore," I said.
"You trust me?" he asked.
"With my soup, my seed, and this small life," I said.
He kissed the back of my neck like a promise. "Then I will take care," he said.
There were storms. Kamilah attempted a petty revenge that ended with her public humiliation and the loss of local trust. High Ma and the other two were told to pay labor for the clothes they'd ruined. The thieves were caught and left shamed. The village saw the change and adapted.
But not all change was fair and clean. A rumor reached town that I had used witchcraft to fatten my fish. The county had simple minds and loud ears. Once the word spread, a crowd formed with torches and pitchforks as if the place in my heart that was tender could be cut like a weed.
Cassius stood in front of me, sleeves rolled, voice steady.
"These are my people," he told the crowd. "This is my kitchen. If you want to accuse her, accuse me first."
The crowd faltered.
"She cooks," another voice said—Findlay Crosby, a merchant whom I had helped feed. "She plants. She hires. She pays. Which part is witchcraft?"
Someone else laughed, the sound like thaw. The crowd dispersed. The pitchforks turned back into sun and the torches became idle stars.
I did not want to be loved for my power. I wanted to be loved for my stubborn loud self—my hands that floured dough, my mouth that cursed when wronged, my laughter that spilled like wine.
"Will you stay?" Cassius asked me one afternoon when the spring field was green.
"I already moved in," I said. "The space is mine and it is ours."
He thought for a long time. "Will you marry me?"
I looked at him and the taste of his words was better than any stew.
"Will you take my name?" he countered, smiling.
"I will sell you my recipes," I said, and then added quietly, "Yes."
We married in the simple way we had lived our days: with a pot of stew in the middle of the room, with Kaka projected onto a screen singing a tiny howling tune, with children from the village who had once called me names now bringing ribbons. The mountain god's shrine on the hill got a new roof, paid for by the earnings of fish and corn and honest labor.
On our wedding day, Kamilah Clemons came again, older and smaller, and she bowed in front of me. Her lips trembled.
"I was wrong," she said. "I was cruel."
"You were afraid," I said. "Make it right."
She tried. She worked in the fields. She carried water. She apologized loudly to those she had hurt. I forgave her the way a farmer forgives a bad season—practical, not naive.
It was not a clean redemption. People are not. She did not get everything back. She lost some respect, but she gained honest work. That was enough.
Years grew like the winter wheat we planted—slow, stubborn, and golden. The inn's name became a sign of the town: people came for the festival and left with stories about the woman who bought a shrine and a field with the same two hands. Cassius and I argued about coats and ledgers and whether to plant radishes or more wheat. We made up with hot soup and quiet nights and the easy press of shoulders.
One evening I sat on the back porch and watched the river gleam and the moon lay like a coin on the water. Faye Willis—my little sister in the body I had—ran barefoot across the yard, now chubby and bright, her cheeks full and clean.
"Play with me," she called.
"I'm busy," I said.
"Not busy enough," she laughed.
Cassius came out with two cups of tea and stood beside me.
"Do you ever think about the woman who lived here before?" he asked.
"Sometimes," I said. "Mostly I think about the woman I used to be. We all have ghosts."
"Do you regret?" he asked.
"Only that I thought love was always a reason to forget yourself," I said. "Now I love and I remember. I keep both."
He smiled and kissed the top of my head. "Good," he said. "Because I love your cooking and your stubbornness in equal measure."
I looked at the shrine on the hill, its new roof bright in moonlight.
"Mountain god," I said softly, "you kept your end. I'll keep mine."
Cassius squeezed my hand.
"We did it," he said simply.
We had survived gossip and violence and the hunger of a life that gives and takes. We had changed the town not by anger but by a steady churn of honest work and an open kitchen. I had found safety in a man who did not try to solve me and a home that smelled of soup and sun.
At night, when the barn was full and the inn's lights winked like kindly eyes, I would step out onto the porch and talk to Kaka on the screen.
"What's next?" Kaka would ask.
I would laugh, thinking of the fields and the recipes and the possibility of more. "A bigger pantry," I would say. "A better roof for the children. Maybe one day, apprentices who know more than me."
"Master Gabriela," Kaka would bark. "We will be very prosperous."
"Bring it on," I would say.
And when the moon hung like a slow coin over the stream, Cassius would slip his arm around my waist and whisper, "I like terrible things with you."
"Then stay terrible with me," I would whisper back.
We were not saints. We were a woman who had been left and a man who had learned to see. We were a kitchen and a farm and a broken shrine that had been fixed with hands that trembled and hands that steadied them. We made dinners, contracts, and apologies. We made bread and set the table for people who said cruel things because they were afraid to be small themselves.
The town grew kinder in ways that mattered: children knew their neighbors' names; women paid their debts and painted their doors; men learned to cook on nights the air tasted of snow.
The story that had been written for me—the one of a woman ruined and forgotten—was revised. I put the pen to the paper and wrote a life that suited my hands.
"To the kitchen," I said one evening, and Cassius, ever ready, took my elbow.
"To the kitchen," he agreed.
And the night folded open like a warm bowl.
The End
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