Chapter Twenty-Two WES
Chapter Twenty-Two
W ES
I didn’t think I’d be making another drive into San Francisco so soon after the disaster that was my visit to the hospital, but here I am, a week later, driving back into the city, this time with a very different purpose.
“So Viv is picking me up at the airport,” Murphy explains to me for the third time. “She’s going to take me to lunch and then we’re meeting with Todd, and then I’ll be back on a plane a few hours later.”
“I still think you jumped the gun in booking a return flight,” I tell her as I pull up to the curb and put my car in park.
She shakes her head. “It’s better this way. A quick trip, less than a day.” Murphy lets out a sigh, then looks at me. “It’ll be good, right?”
I reach over and put my hand on her knee, giving it a squeeze. “It’s going to be great. And the good news is that you are one hundred percent in control of yourself and what you decide to do,” I remind her. “So if you hate it, you say thanks but no thanks, and you come back.”
Murphy nods, then puts her hand on top of mine. “Thank you. For the ride, but also for encouraging me. It’s been a long time since I’ve gotten that from anyone but myself.”
She leans across the console and I meet her, pressing my lips to hers in a kiss that is over far too quickly.
“Safe flight.”
“Love you.”
“Love you .”
And then she’s getting out of the car and closing the door behind her, waving on her way through the sliding doors that lead into the airport, with nothing but a purse slung over her shoulder and her guitar case. I chuckle to myself at the fact she didn’t even pack a bag, then pull away from the curb and follow the signs to exit the airport.
Last weekend, after Murphy and I discussed her going to LA and I lugged her guitar out to my cabin, she surprised me by actually opening her case and singing to me. She sang a few songs, and then she cried as she sang, and it was beautiful and heartbreaking and made me wish there was anything I could do.
She surprised me again a few days later when she said she wanted to go meet with the people at Humble Roads and hear what they have to say.
I’m proud of her for giving it a shot, even if I do think she’s being a little hasty about only flying down for a single day.
Less than a single day. Ten hours at most, including her time in the air.
But she’s still going. She’s still pushing herself. And even though she might have to deal with some uncomfortable thoughts or feelings while she’s there, I think she’ll be better for it in the end, regardless of the outcome.
It’s because she’s willing to push herself that I’ve decided to do the same.
Twenty minutes later, I pull into a space down the street from Seasons, the restaurant that I worked at for six years before I moved to Chicago. It’s still fairly early, and there’s a chance that Chef Hines isn’t here since none of his restaurants are open on Mondays.
But I know Bernard, and for as long as I’ve known him, he’s spent Monday mornings in the same booth at Seasons, sipping coffee and doing the Sunday crossword, since his Sundays are usually too busy to take the time.
When I walk up to the building, peering through the large glass windows, I spot him. Exactly where I thought he would be.
It’s always something I’ve admired about him, how dedicated he is to keeping his life and work simple and focused on the things that matter. He told me that once, that so many restaurants fail because they try to do too many things and end up alienating the customers that built them up in the first place.
I guess that’s kind of what happened to me, in a personal sense. Instead of staying focused on the things I know and was passionate about, I decided to do too much. To be too many things to too many people.
And in doing so, I forgot who I was.
I tap lightly on the glass of one of those large windows. When Chef Hines looks up and sees me, he takes off his glasses, almost like he can’t believe his eyes. Then I hear the faint sound of his shouted “Wesley!” before he leaves his booth and heads to the front.
He opens the door just as I get there, and then he yanks me in for a hug, my tall frame bending slightly as I wrap my arms around him as well.
“Wesley!” he says again, then pulls back and places his hands on either side of my face. “I can’t believe you’re here!”
It’s only in this very moment that I realize how worried I was that he’d turn me away, and I can’t help but smile, reveling in his joy at seeing me.
“I’m sorry I haven’t been by sooner,” I tell him. “I missed you.”
Chef Hines pats me on the shoulder, then waves for me to follow him inside. Once we’re both in, he relocks the front door and leads me over to his booth.
“I wish I had known you were coming today. Linus would have so loved to see you,” he tells me, referring to his partner. Then he gestures for me to take a seat across from him in the booth. “How long are you in town?”
“I’m actually back in California.” I pause. “I’m the head chef at a new restaurant at a winery in Rosewood.”
“That’s wonderful, Wes. I’m so happy for you. A better fit than the Santiagos, yes?”
I lick my lips, letting out an awkward chuckle. “Yes. Definitely a better fit.”
Then he gives me a sympathetic look, and I suddenly realize ... He already knows.
“I’m sorry that things didn’t work out for you. But the best thing you could do is move on and find something else. Sounds like that’s exactly what you did.”
“How’d you hear about it?”
He taps his pen against the newspaper between us. “Alejandro called me. Right after it happened.”
I blink a few times, and this time I’m more than surprised. “He what ?”
“The way he phrased it was something like, ‘I just left your little protégé on the street with a black eye. You better teach him how shit works, Bernard. Get him out of Chicago.’”
Nausea begins to rise inside me, and embarrassment isn’t far behind.
“I’m so sorry, Chef,” I tell him, unable to look him in the eye. “I didn’t mean for you to be involved in any of it.”
When I finally do look at him, I see that same sympathetic look from before.
“Wes, I don’t know all the details of what happened. But it doesn’t surprise me that the road you were on ended up bringing you back here. Men like Alejandro Santiago are very different from men like you, and please believe me when I say that is a compliment.”
Part of me wishes that Chef Hines had been a little more forthcoming when I was considering the move to Chicago to work for the Santiagos. If I had known how much he disliked the man, maybe I would have made a different decision.
But in the same breath, I know it’s not his responsibility. He did warn me, after all.
Part of me thinks that maybe he actually made the right call in letting me figure it out myself. There are definitely some lessons I learned from my experience in Chicago and working for Alejandro and Bridget that I wouldn’t have learned if I hadn’t made the mistake of going.
“Come,” he says, a genuine smile on his face. “Let’s make something together.”
An hour later, we’re standing on opposite sides of a counter in the Seasons kitchen, each of us enjoying a slice of an artichoke flatbread pizza that reminds me of all the incredible ways Chef Hines knows how to use veggies as a primary.
My biggest weakness has always been how heavily I lean in to protein, and I make a pointed note to myself to remember this as I’m making adjustments to my menu in the future.
We spent the entirety of our cooking time going over what happened in Chicago. There is nothing as horrible as sharing your failures with the man who trained you, pointing out all the ways you didn’t become the person he tried to mold you into.
“I’m sorry I let you down,” I tell him, wiping off my hands on a napkin.
“You didn’t let me down, Wes.”
He crosses his arms and pins me with a look I know all too well.
It means a lesson is coming.
“Despite everything, I am proud of you,” he continues. “I’m proud of all you’ve accomplished and all you’ve tried to accomplish, because it means you pushed yourself outside of what is easy. So please don’t rest how you feel about everything on me being disappointed in you.”
His words ease something tight in my chest, and I give him a grateful nod.
“What it sounds like, though,” he adds—and here comes the lesson, I can feel it—“is that you let yourself down. You had expectations for yourself, and however things turned out with the Santiagos isn’t what you had hoped for.”
Fuck if that isn’t the truth.
“So the best thing you can do is learn from it.” He shrugs a shoulder. “It’s that simple and that easy. And it’s also that difficult and that complicated. Because not everybody knows how to learn from their mistakes. Instead they just keep doing the same things over and over again and hoping to come out better the next time.”
Chef Hines drops his arms and rounds the counter, then places his hands on each of my biceps.
“But I know you know this already. It sounds like you’re already making changes, figuring out what to do next, how to do it better.”
He squeezes gently, then lets his hands fall away and turns to clear the dishes we used to make the flatbread pizza.
“So what you need, Wes, is not to come to me hoping for forgiveness. You need to look inward for that. You are the only one who can forgive yourself for the ways that you feel like you’ve let yourself down. And that is one of the hardest things any of us can learn how to do.”
When I pick Murphy up from the airport later that evening, I can pretty much tell from her smile that the day was amazing. I already had an idea that she was enjoying it from the dozen or so texts she sent me throughout the day, but the pure joy radiating off her is just confirmation of what I only thought I knew.
“Tell me everything.”
“They offered me a job as a songwriter.”
I smile as I pull out into traffic. “Holy shit!”
“I know! It was so much better than I thought it was going to be, you know? Todd is actually really nice, and he set me up in the booth and had me play some of my music for him. And he said he wants me to write music for their artists. Not just Vivian, but other artists, too. People I admire and think are insanely talented.”
She sinks farther into the seat, a dreamy smile on her face.
“I can’t believe this is happening.”
I reach over and rest my hand on her thigh, giving it a light squeeze. “I can. When you’re as talented as you are, a guy like Paul can only hold you back for so long.”
Murphy gives me an embarrassed smile and hooks her hand into mine.
She tells me about her day, from the time she landed to visiting the record label’s headquarters.
And all the while, I’m gearing myself up for the part where she tells me that she’s moving back to LA. It makes sense that they would want her there, to be able to sit outside the recording rooms and collaborate.
She was happy there until it all fell apart, so I know she’ll be happy there again.
Even if it means she leaves me behind.
“They want me to move to LA,” she eventually shares.
She turns in her seat and raises her knee to her chest, then wraps her arms around it before slipping her hand back into mine.
I swallow thickly, the time I spent getting ready for this conversation doing almost nothing to truly prepare me for how it feels to hear her say it. To know she’s going to leave.
The feelings swirling in my chest are much stronger than I anticipated, and it takes everything inside me not to beg her to—
“I told them no.”
My head swings to the side, and I hold tightly to the steering wheel, careful not to jerk us into a neighboring lane.
“What?”
Her smile is soft, and she squeezes my hand.
“I told them that I would love to work for them, but that I didn’t want to be based in LA or anywhere in Southern California.”
“Murphy . . .”
“My life is here now, Wes.”
“But that doesn’t mean you can’t rebuild a life there.”
“I know that.” She squeezes my hand again. “I know that. But it’s not just my life that’s here, Wes. My heart is here, too. And that’s something I won’t be able to find there. I just won’t.”
My own heart constricts in my chest, the overwhelming feeling of knowing I’ve found my soulmate coursing through me and out to my veins, to every part of my body.
I look over at Murphy again, and this time, I can see she has tears in her eyes.
“I love you.”
It’s a whisper when she says it, but her words have never sounded so loud and strong in my mind.
In my heart.
“I love you, too.”
We ride in silence for a little while, the lights of passing cars illuminating her face enough for me to glance over and look at her often, and I love seeing the happy little smile on her lips.
And all the while, her hand never leaves mine.
I hope it never does.