Free Stunning by Sara Shepard Page B

bowls, and a half-chopped leek lay limply on their cutting board. The room smelled of boiling chicken broth, gas from the burners, and the pungent cinnamon Trident that Marge, the lady behind them, chewed nonstop.
    All eyes were on Madame Richeau, their instructor. Even though she’d only been a cook on a Carnival cruise ship for all of six months in the eighties, she acted as though she were a celebrity chef on the Food Network, wearing a tall toque and speaking with a dubious French accent.
    “The key to good risotto is constant stirring,” Madame Richeau said, inserting a wooden spoon into a pot and rotating it slowly around. She pronounced the like zee. “Never stop stirring until the rice is creamy. It’s a hard technique to master! Now, stir, stir, stir!”
    Noel nudged Aria. “You aren’t stirring fast enough.”
    Aria snapped to attention and looked down at her pot, which was full of Arborio rice and bubbling broth. “Oops,” she said distractedly, giving the concoction a few good mixes.
    “Would you rather chop?” Noel held up the Japanese knife he’d brought from his parents’ kitchen. He was at work cutting a red onion for a side salad. “I don’t want our risotto to be ruined. Madame might give us the guillotine,” he said with a sly smile.
    “I’m cool,” Aria said, glancing at his workstation. “Besides, I could never slice that onion as well as you.” Surprisingly, Noel had turned out to be pretty good at the class—especially the chopping part. Aria always got bored halfway through and left her vegetables in big, unwieldy chunks.
    She could feel Noel studying her, but she pretended not to notice, instead vigorously stirring the risotto. Thankfully, Noel had missed the town hall meeting last night because he and his lacrosse buddies had a team dinner. And their schedules didn’t intersect in school for the past two days, which meant she hadn’t seen him in the halls. She’d considered not coming to cooking class, too, but then Noel would ask why. And what was she supposed to say—that she’d seen his father squeezing tomatoes in a dress at Fresh Fields?
    She shuddered, the image swimming into her mind again. The moment she’d realized Mr. Kahn’s long-lost sister might just be Mr. Kahn himself, she’d shot out of the produce section as fast as she could and hidden behind a rack of French bread. She’d watched the man from afar, praying that she was wrong. Maybe it was another dude in drag. Maybe it was a really ugly woman. But then the person’s cell phone rang. “Hello?” a man’s voice said into the receiver—a man’s voice that sounded exactly like Mr. Kahn’s. Game over.
    Aria wasn’t sure who she felt more embarrassed for—Mr. Kahn or herself. She couldn’t shake the feeling that the whole thing was her fault, which was how she’d felt when she discovered Byron kissing Meredith in seventh grade. If she hadn’t walked down that alley, if she hadn’t turned her head at that moment , she wouldn’t have been burdened with her dad’s secret—or the agonizing struggle of whether to tell Ella. Likewise, if she’d only gone to Fresh Fields a few moments later, or lingered at the cheese counter, she wouldn’t know something so damaging about Noel’s dad.
    But now that she did know, she was dying to dig deeper. Was this something Mr. Kahn did often? He was a little odd—he’d dressed up as a cavemannish Viking for Klaudia’s welcome-to-the-U.S. party a month ago, and he was always drunkenly belting out opera songs and show tunes at Rosewood Day school board fund-raiser parties. But dressing up as a woman—in public ? Didn’t he realize how that would look if someone caught him? And surely Mr. and Mrs. Kahn’s marriage wasn’t as solid as Aria had thought. Were they one of those couples who put up appearances but secretly didn’t love each other at all? That just made her heart break for Noel even more. He idolized his parents’ strong bond.
    Aria had promised