Ignorance is bliss. Unless of course, you’re trying to impress your new boyfriend (who happens to be so perfect that he makes even spitting appear natural and graceful) with etiquette and culinary skills you have never, ever possessed.

Chloe understood this. In fact, she’d been panicking over it for the last five days. Visions of an ideal dinner, an authentic home-cooked Chinese dinner complete with chopsticks and MSG-free sweet and sour sauce, warred with images of past failures— especially, the happy anniversary breakfast she’d made for Craig and Nancy last year.

It hadn’t been very happy. The Paul Bunyan Blueberry Beauty pancakes she made from scratch with very little deviation from Mrs. Horton’s secret recipe had been impossible to flip without massive breakage. Ultimately, they looked more like the hash browns than the hash browns did, which wasn’t too surprising, what with the potatoes taking on that green tinge. In retrospect she wouldn’t add so much bacon grease. To put it mildly, the eggs were runny, the bacon was black, the orange juice was seedy, the potatoes were sick, and the pancakes were hash.

But the toast, the toast was perfection! It was golden, crisp on the outside with just the right hint of drizzled butter to accent the warm flaky inside. They were four fabulous slices of heaven. Craig and Nancy swear they still dream about that toast.

They couldn’t stop raving about it from the tenth second after she entered their bedroom without knocking. As for those initial moments, well perhaps some things are best unsaid as some things are best uneaten. And maybe it was divine providence after all instead of poor timing which caused Chloe to cover her eyes in embarrassment spilling the entire meal except for the shielding toast.

In the end, bolstered by toast praise, she chalked up the rest of her mistakes to poor cooking utensils as she continued to shun Home Economics as a subject beneath her superior intellect.

It was an error in pride that she now regretted deeply. The kitchen was a mess. Cookbooks, abandoned entrees, spices, chopped vegetables, dirty dishes, flour, eggs, a wok (now duly seasoned), milk cartons, spilled rice, cooked and uncooked noodles, splattered oil were scattered across the counter while the heady smell of garlic, ginger, and singed plastic permeated the room.

From the time on her watch, Chloe had officially abandoned the fight a half hour ago. Take-out would be arriving shortly as would Brady. She had set the table, dressed in a midnight blue sleeveless Cheongsam, and devised eight separate lame excuses to keep her aficionado away from the kitchen. She also bandaged the small burn on her inner right wrist and the minor cut on her left pinky.

Since then, she was practicing how to pick up plain spaghetti noodles with chopsticks. Yet even with the hand diagrams and instructions she’d downloaded from the internet, it wasn’t going very well. She could form a V without problem, resting the end of the lower chopstick in the crook between her thumb and her forefinger, but her ring finger, which was suppose to help her pinky to support the bottom chopstick from beneath, instead kept inching above the stick determined to hold it in place but effectively stopping the motion of the upper chopstick in the process. When she did manage to keep her ring finger and pinky in the right place, her forefinger and middle finger, which were suppose to be holding the upper chopstick like a pencil and were suppose to do all the moving, wouldn’t cooperate.

At one point, the upper chopstick slid out from between her fingers and onto the floor. At another, she became so frustrated she held the chopstick like a spear and tried to skewer the noodles which slipped aside. Then she held the sticks together as if they were one and began using them as a scoop trying to shovel the noodles into her mouth. But, they slithered off and she was forced to return to instruction, her fingers in awkward position.

Unfortunately at this point, she got a cramp in her hand.

Flinging down the sticks, she smacked her palm against the table trying to beat the pain out. She squeaked, “Ow, ow, cramp, ow,” as she jumped up and down rubbing and flexing the tender area.

Once the cramp eased she took a short break retrieving a fork from the kitchen. She raised the fork as if she was going to hack apart the chopsticks with the silver utensil. Yet controlling herself, she set the fork aside, closed her eyes, and took a deep breath. She released it and took another breath.

“Millions of people eat with chopsticks, every day. Two-year olds eat with chopsticks. I can eat with chopsticks.”

She set to practicing again and soon discovered that it helped to brace the bottom stick against her pinky and ring finger’s uppermost knuckles. She wasn’t sure if it was correct technique, but at least she could move the upper chopstick freely while keeping the bottom one still. She tackled the noodles. Many landed on her lap, but some landed in her mouth. Giddy with progress she struggled on.

The delivery man came and went and still she practiced, concentrating so hard that she lost track of time. It didn’t occur to her to be worried that Brady was late. She had no idea that Ling had attacked at the park, that Brady was wounded, that Will was on the run.

She didn’t know she was in danger.