1. Mirepoix
MIREPOIX
*the brunoise should be so small, the onions will melt.
One year later
Are you kidding? You’re not coming at all?
Shuffling onto the flight home, I had to admit that while I wasn’t back in New York yet, in some ways, it was like I had never left.
People in lines were always grouchy. Airports sucked, even in Paris. And my little sister was still flaking out on me.
Again .
Her response was almost instantaneous, long, and riddled with minor errors that told me she was dictating.
Its not my fault this time, I swear it. Tommy got kicked out of summer camp and Lea needs to be at the shop because theres an inspector or a plier coming shit not that pliers stupid autocorrect
I think you mean appraiser?
Lea, our oldest sister, was in the middle of selling the auto repair shop that had been in our family since the fifties—first owned by our grandfather, then taken over by Lea and her husband Mike after Nonno died.
Since Mike had passed last year, the shop was dead weight for a suddenly single mom with four kids.
An appraiser meant she had accepted an offer, which was both excellent news and admittedly inconvenient.
Now I’d be flying into JFK without a ride.
Yeah, that guy. I have pick up Tommy for her, but I won’t be able to do that, come get you, and then be back in Belmont before the other two get out of school. Can’t you just take a cab or a Lyft? I’ll pay you back.
“With what money?” I muttered.
My sister, a professional dancer who was recovering from a knee injury last year, didn’t exactly have gobs of cash.
Sure, she was now involved with a guy who had some money (she and Nathan lived together in his gorgeous apartment on the Upper West Side), but Joni herself survived on tips from bartending.
To her credit, she was adamant about earning her own way as best she could.
Unfortunately, that still meant she was frequently broke.
Do you know that for sure? I asked myself as the line shuffled forward. Maybe I was also falling back into old patterns, which included assuming the worst of Joni. We’d spent most of our lives sniping with each other. But in the last year, I’d grown up a bit, and she had too.
Joni wasn’t the self-absorbed flirt I’d left last September who couldn’t be depended on to close a door.
She had a new man, a new knee, a new part in an off-Broadway musical, and according to Lea, she’d been a huge help since Mike died last May.
Right now, Joni was ditching me to help someone who needed it a lot more than I did.
Someone who would need me too as soon as I was settled back into life in New York.
No worries. I’ll find a ride. Take care of Lea.
The hard part would be finding a car big enough to take me and my three giant suitcases all the way to Westchester. Most of the Prius cabs lined up outside arrivals weren’t even willing to drive to the Bronx.
Good and in case i didn’t say it enough I LOVE YOU AND IM SO GLAD YOUR BACK MIMI!!!
I stared at the message as the line to board the plane moved forward another four people. No barbs. No jabs. No jokes, calling me a wallflower or a shut-in.
Things really had changed.
I typed out my response carefully. Maybe a little warily.
Me too. See you soon.
“ Bienvenue ,” said the flight attendant in her thick French accent as I entered the plane. “Where are you seated?”
I held out my ticket. “Thirty-one D.”
Her eyes popped open. “Er. One moment, please.”
I stood in the entrance, ignoring the glares of the waiting passengers behind me, including one hoity-toity woman wearing a Cartier watch who looked like she wanted to walk right over me.
A year ago? I might have let her.
“Excuse me!” she called to the attendant with an accent that marked her as extremely American. “Hello, we are trying to get on the plane! I don’t see why this woman gets special treatment while the rest of us wait!”
The flight attendant looked understandable frazzled while she consulted with one of her co-workers about my ticket.
But, along with getting a degree in culinary arts, a makeover, and a social life in Paris, I had also acquired a backbone.
The shapeless skirts and frumpy sweaters had been traded for more tailored silhouettes.
Glasses had been replaced with contacts that made my green eyes pop.
My dark hair had been snipped to a chin-length bob, and I’d even learned how to apply a little bit of makeup.
According to Louis Bekhti, up-and-coming stylist and one of the good friends I’d made in Paris, I was the embodiment of French girl chic and needed the attitude to go with it.
I wasn’t French. And I doubted I would ever be truly chic. But whoever says beauty is skin deep hasn’t learned to draw a cat-eye and julienne carrots with equal precision.
“She’s just doing her job,” I told the Cartier woman.
“And I’ve just been waiting forever,” the woman snapped. “These people are as slow as molasses.”
“These people are just trying to do their job,” I said. “ Va te faire cuire un oeuf ?”
The number of elegant French insults related to eggs had always delighted me, but this was the first time I’d ever had the opportunity to use one for real.
I leveled the Cartier woman’s death glare with my own. She looked away first.
“I’m sorry, madame , but there has been an error with your seat.”
I turned to the flight attendant. “What’s that?”
“Another passenger was issued the same one and has already been seated. Economy is completely full.”
My jaw tightened. Maybe the universe didn’t want me back in New York. Maybe this was a sign I was supposed to stay in Paris for good.
God knew part of me wanted to.
“However,” the flight attendant continued in French with a lower voice, “we do have one seat available in first class. Come with me.”
I blinked. “Oh, um. D’accord .”
I followed her across the galley and into the first-class cabin, where she pointed to an empty row. “The window, please.”
I nodded as if it were the most normal thing in the world for someone like me to be sitting in first class. Until last year, I’d only been on a plane twice in my entire life. “Wow. Thank you.”
“No, thank you ,” she said with a grateful smile before walking back to the front of the plane.
The remaining passengers boarded while I made a few notes in the Moleskine journal where I kept recipe ideas, then took out my Kindle to begin the romance novel I’d downloaded for the trip.
Normally, I was a cinnamon roll kind of gal, but lately, I’d been veering toward the Darcy types: tall, imperious watchdogs whose stoic exteriors hid a fiercely protective instincts and even bigger hearts.
Maybe it was because I’d been a watcher most of my life, but after a year on my own, I was more than ready to be seen.
What would that be like in New York?
“Seat four B, yeah, thanks. Here’s my jacket, and I’ll take a double Hendricks and tonic when you can. Or whatever your top shelf is.” There was a thump as a man landed in the seat next to me, along with a heady whiff of expensive cologne. “Well, hello, there.”
I looked up from the first page of a marriage of convenience that was not at all convenient and promptly lost all feeling in my toes.
No, it couldn’t be.
Was it really him? In the flesh, sitting next to me on my way home?
I blinked. And continued blinking, enough times that I probably looked like I was having a minor seizure.
But it was, in fact, him .
Second son of one of the richest families in New York (otherwise known as the employers who sent me to Paris).
Constant gossip fodder with a parade of models, actresses, and socialites on his arm.
Singular object of my fantasies for literally ten years.
I shook my head, still not convinced that I wasn’t imagining him. “Daniel?”
The toothpaste-ad smile that only seemed to belong to really rich people faltered slightly, then grew bigger when our eyes met, his sky-blue confidence colliding with my murky green shock. “Well, well. Do we know each other?”
Those lips, soft and pink, curved into a knowing smile.
He was even more gorgeous than I remembered.
His floppy, sun-streaked hair had grown out like Bridget Jones -era Hugh Grant.
His high cheekbones and softly chiseled jaw were dappled with gold-toned stubble and a deep tan, courtesy of a summer spent on his family’s yacht on the Amalfi coast, if the tabloids were to be believed.
He looked sun-kissed and impossibly perfect in just-worn jeans, unmarked sneakers, and a Gucci sweater that probably cost more than my monthly stipend.
The sheer combination of luck, fortune, and charm should have caused a rip in the space-time continuum. But, like everything else in Daniel Lyons’s charmed life, it all just worked.
My mouth opened. Then closed. Then opened again like an animatronic toy as I processed the fact that one of two things was true:
Daniel Lyons had never actually known who I was (even though I had personally done his laundry or made his favorite grilled gruyere on sourdough for ten years), or
Daniel Lyons didn’t recognize me because my makeover was that good .
I went with number two. Louis would be ecstatic.
So, I did something that, until recently, wasn’t very Marie of me.
I smiled at him.
And was immediately rewarded when Daniel-freaking-Lyons’s elbow fell off the armrest, like my grin stunned him just as much as his blinded me.
“I—shit.” He yanked at the collar of his sweater. “I mean, shoot. Wow.”
“From Westchester?” I offered, hoping it would jog his memory.
His cocky smile snapped back into place. “Oh, sure. Yeah. From last…summer, right? At the Hunt party? Or was it the Sinai benefit?”
Yeah, he definitely didn’t know who I was. Somehow, that made it easier to talk to him.
To Daniel Lyons, I was chic. I was a pretty girl he’d taken it upon himself to approach, like any other I’d watched him seduce. For the first time, I—Marie Zola, family drudge, neighborhood wallflower—was worthy of conquest by someone like him .
I’d be living on this moment for years.
“Doesn’t the family usually fly private?” I asked, conscious of the fact that it was the first complete sentence I’d ever managed to get out in this man’s presence.
“Er, yes, but…” Daniel gave his collar one last pull, then seemed to make a decision and leaned close enough to give me another whiff of his cologne.
That hadn’t changed either. It was some custom scent that smelled of vanilla, citrus, and rain. When I was sixteen, I’d kept an old T-shirt of his under my pillow for two months until it lost the scent.
I didn’t say I was proud.
“Mom had the jet this weekend. She’s flying back from St. Bart’s, so I had to settle for commercial.”
“Oh,” I just managed, still reeling from his scent. “Have you been in Paris long, then?”
He shook his head, causing a few bits of hair to flop onto his forehead like a Disney prince. “God, no. It’s a sewer in August, just like New York, don’t you think? I’m off to the Hamptons when I get back. You?”
I shrugged. “I, um, might go there too.”
Too cook for him and his parents, I didn’t add, but only if Ondine wasn’t available.
I also failed to mention that other than this last year training at the Culinary Institute of Paris, I had never spent any other August outside of New York’s admittedly swampy climate, so I didn’t know anything different.
“What were you doing in Paris?” I asked before he could press about the Hamptons.
“Oh, nothing major.” Daniel accepted his drink from the flight attendant with a wink. “Just messing around with a girl—a friend, I mean, after spending a few weeks on the yacht in St. Tropez. How about you?”
I should have told the truth. I hadn’t spent the year drinking champagne and having affairs like the girl he obviously thought I was, but instead had mastered julienne, paysanne, and brunoise knife cuts in a windowless kitchen.
But the plane hadn’t even left the gate, and we had an eight-and-a-half-hour flight ahead of us.
And Daniel Lyons was looking at me—really looking at me—for the first time ever.
Right now, I was his equal. Maybe even someone he was interested in.
That would change the moment I told the truth.
So, I didn’t lie, per se.
I just left some things out.
“I was studying for the last year,” I told him.
“Oh, a smarty-pants, eh? What’s your major?”
I bit my lip. I wasn’t a good liar. Joni called me “narc” until we were out of high school, and it wasn’t because I was a tattle. Our grandparents and teachers simply knew my face would tell them anything they needed to know.
“I get it.” Daniel flashed a knowing grin and a wink.
“Student of life. Me too. I never made it through college, much to my family’s disappointment.
But life is just too damn interesting.” He gave a heavy sigh filled with longing and memories.
“I think I was eighteen the first time I traveled through Europe. Took the whole summer before I went to school.”
I nodded. I remembered this trip. I was fifteen at the time and had been working for the Lyons family for four months. While packing, Daniel said “thank you” when I took a water glass to the kitchen for him. By the time I reached the kitchen, I knew what kind of flowers I wanted at our wedding.
I cried for two days after he left and cried again with relief when he flunked out of Princeton after one semester and had to come home.
“My friends and I backpacked all over,” he continued after another sip of his drink. “Saw everything, had some real adventures. You know what I’m talking about.”
I didn’t, but I nodded anyway when he winked again because the twist in my stomach would have made me stammer.
I also knew that “backpacking” was a generous way of describing a summer spent on and off yachts belonging to other equally wealthy friends.
Daniel had eventually demanded that his family buy their own.
“Sounds life-changing,” I managed.
When he looked like he was about to ask me another question, I took a cue from Joni: keep them talking. Just like my sister charming an extra chicken cutlet at the corner deli, I batted my eyelashes and pouted my lips. Just a little.
I was flirting. Flirting with Daniel Lyons .
And based on the way his eyes dropped to my mouth, it was working.
I offered the smile I’d practiced in the mirror over the last year. “Tell me more.”