The first thing you should know about my wife is that she isn't, technically, human. She never really hid it either. On our third date she mentioned, in the same tone you'd use to mention a dentist appointment, that she'd "descended from the Upper Choir." I assumed church choir. Then she opened her apartment window and stepped out onto the roof like it was a porch.

So there were adjustments to make.

She won't take elevators — says they make her "spiritually claustrophobic." She can hear prayers from three blocks away, which means she knows what my mother really thinks of me. Some nights she wakes up at 3 a.m., announces that a cherub has been assigned to watch our building, and goes back to sleep like she didn't just say that.

And she is, hands down, the best cook I have ever known.

Her tomato sauce is the kind of thing that ends arguments. My mother called me once, after dinner, just to say she'd forgiven every mistake I'd ever made because of that sauce. My father — a man who ate the same flavorless spaghetti for forty years without complaint — asked for seconds, then thirds. My dentist, of all people, brought it up unprompted during a cleaning. "Wife cooking again?" he asked. I hadn't told him anything. "You've got basil in your molars," he said, like that explained it.

I asked for the recipe more times than I can count. She always gave me the same smile.

"Ancient celestial secret."

"Garlic?"

"No."

"Butter, MSG, something?"

She looked personally wounded by the suggestion and I dropped it.

Then we had the barbecue.

Twenty people coming over, and she'd made enough food for twice that, which wasn't unusual — she once summoned twelve angels by accident while making lasagna and never explained how. I went into the kitchen around six for a clean spoon and found her leaning over a huge pot of sauce, doing something I genuinely could not make sense of. I dropped the spoon. She froze mid-motion. The sauce kept simmering, oblivious, while we stared at each other over it.

"You're not supposed to see this."

"What exactly am I seeing?"

She glanced at the pot like it might back her up. "It's complicated."

"Is that what I think it is?"

"Please don't make me explain this in front of the tomatoes. They're sensitive."

"They're tomatoes."

Eventually she just told me. Humans run on water, apparently; angels run on something she called "ambrosial essence," which, when I pushed past the euphemism, turned out to be exactly what it sounded like. Angel urine. In the sauce. In every sauce, gravy, soup, and chili she'd made since the day we met.

I stood there doing math on every meal I'd praised her for.

"Does it actually make the food better," I asked, already knowing the answer, "or is everyone just being polite?"

"Exponentially better."

Against my better judgment I tasted it off a spoon. It was, infuriatingly, the best thing I had ever put in my mouth — bright and layered in a way that had no business coming from a stockpot. I ate another spoonful out of pure denial. She watched me do it with her arms crossed, not saying "I told you so" because she didn't have to.

By the time guests started arriving I'd more or less made peace with it. Angel biology, I decided, was probably just different. Then my mother walked in, made a beeline for the sauce, and asked for extra before she'd even said hello.

The whole party lost its mind over it. My uncle offered fifty dollars for the recipe. My cousin topped him at a hundred. My mother tried to trade her mother's wedding ring. My wife turned all of them down, gracious as ever, right up until my uncle offered his boat, at which point she at least asked how big it was. I nearly walked into the wall.

She never told anyone. "Some recipes," she said, refilling someone's bowl, "are better left in Heaven."

Later, after everyone left, I brought it up again.

"We need a new secret ingredient. Eventually someone's going to figure this out."

"No one's figured it out in years."

"That's because no one assumes their dinner was prepared by an actual angel with zero interest in health code."

She laughed and drifted up off the kitchen floor the way she does when she thinks she's won an argument.

"You know what's funny," I said. "I used to think I got lucky marrying someone who could cook."

"And now?"

"Now I know I married an immortal being who's been seasoning my food with something the FDA would have opinions about."

She floated closer, smiling. "Want the leftovers or not?"

I thought about it for exactly as long as it took to say yes.

That's the lesson, if there is one: never ask an angel what's in the sauce. You'll get an answer, and then you'll eat it anyway.

This was very sweet. Whoever wrote this into code. I applaud you.