He Gave Her My Kitchen. I Took Everything Chapter 05

He Gave Her My Kitchen. I Took Everything Chapter 05

They’re saying the shellfish is what, Sienna?”

She was crying so hard she was hiccupping. Somewhere behind her I could hear a man shouting and the specific, awful sound of a compressor failing.

“The walk-in’s been at fifty-one degrees. Maybe since Sunday. The logs – “A wet breath. “Nora, the logs aren’t filled out. Nobody told me somebody had to do the logs every day.”

Tab three. Page one. Highlighted in yellow. Cold chain temperature logs must be recorded twice daily. Health department has an open corrective action; a second violation triggers immediate closure.

“It was in the binder,” I said.

“I don’t – Grant said we didn’t need – “She stopped. Started again, softer, wheedling. “Okay. Okay. I know I said I could handle it. But you’re the one who set all this up, so technically, if something’s wrong with it, it’s kind of still your responsibility, right? You have to help me. Please. Just tell me what to do.”

There it was. That’s the trick, isn’t it? They take your title, your salary, your name, your kitchen – and the second it burns, it’s yours again.

“Sienna.”

“Yeah?”

“I resigned eight days ago. You signed the handover. You told me, in front of Grant, that it wasn’t complicated, because it’s just food.” I watched a pelican drop into the water outside my window. “So handle it.”

“Nora

“Call the health department yourself before they call you. Voluntarily close. Dump every crate. It’ll cost you forty thousand dollars and it’ll save you a lot more.”

“Grant will kill me. We’ve got the gala Saturday, we can’t – ”

“Then you have your answer,” I said, and hung up.

I turned my phone face-down and went to the beach.

Here’s the thing about the twelve days I spent in Coral Bay: they were the first twelve days of my adult life.

I don’t say that for drama. I woke up when I woke up. I ate food someone else cooked and I didn’t taste it for seasoning. I swam. I read an entire novel. I got a sunburn on the backs of my knees, which is a thing that only happens to people who lie down in the middle of the day.

At Whitmore House, I had a windowless office next to the dry storage. My chair was broken. Once, I asked Grant for a real desk and he told me the front of house was where guests could see, so that’s where the money

vent.

Daniel Kane had emailed me a photo of my future office at the flagship. Corner of the building. Twelve-foot

windows facing the harbor. Subject line: Yours if you want it. No rush – finish your vacation.

I wrote back three words: I want it.

That afternoon, the messages started rolling in from my old crew, all of them within about forty minutes of each other, all of them saying nearly the same sentence.

Nora, Chef says if you come back he’ll put your name on the menu.

Nora, he says he’ll make you a partner. Like actual equity.

Nora, please, he’s screaming at everybody, Manny quit, we’re all getting destroyed out here.

I read every single one.

And I thought about the courtroom in the life before this one. About Manny – Manny, who I put through his externship, who cried at our staff Christmas party because I’d covered his mother’s insurance copay – sitting on a wooden bench in a borrowed tie, saying under oath that Chef Quinn was erratic about temperatures.

They weren’t sorry now. They were scared now. Those are not the same thing, and I’d paid for that lesson with an entire life.

I didn’t reply to any of them.

I blocked all fourteen numbers instead, one by one, in alphabetical order, sitting on a beach chair with a drink sweating in the sand beside me. It took nine minutes.

–

The phone rang the second I finished. Number I didn’t recognize an 843 area code.

I picked up out of pure curiosity.

“Nora.” Grant’s voice, hoarse and ragged, from a phone that wasn’t his. “Don’t hang up. Don’t you dare hang up. Do you have any idea what you’ve done to me?”