Chapter 4 Genevieve
Genevieve
Fourteen Months Ago
The key to a perfect crème br?lée is patience.
You can’t rush the torch. Can’t let the flame linger too long in one spot or you’ll burn the sugar.
The caramel needs to be glass smooth, to crack under a spoon like thin ice in winter.
My father taught me that when I was six, standing on a step stool in our kitchen, my small hands wrapped around his.
“Patience, mon chou,” he’d said. “Everything good requires patience.”
Around me, the kitchen of Cameliard hums with controlled chaos, the head chef Michel barking orders in rapid-fire French, the line cooks moving in a choreographed dance to the sounds of sizzles hitting hot pans.
Dinner service is my favorite part of the day. Mainly because it doesn’t give me space to ruminate on things like my lack of a social life or if my father will make it home at the end of each night.
Here at the restaurant, my biggest concern is whether the béchamel needs another minute or if the reduction is ready.
My phone rings.
Shit.
I ignore it, focusing on the br?lée. The sugar’s almost there, that perfect moment right before it goes from caramelized to—
It rings again.
“Genevieve.” Chef Michel’s voice is a razor, his blue eyes homed in on me. “If you’re going to let your phone interrupt my service, you can leave my kitchen.”
“Yes, Chef. Sorry, Chef.” I set down the torch and pull out my phone, fingers trembling, and silence it.
But the message on the screen makes me smile.
ART:
Landing in Boston tonight. Something important with your dad and Freddy, blah blah, lawyer shit. Dinner tomorrow? Miss you.
I bite my lip, thumb hovering over the keyboard.
We’ve been doing this long-distance dance for over a year now—him visiting when his family’s lawyer has business with my dad. What “business” a mayor’s lawyer has with a criminal defense attorney, I have no clue. But I learned a long time ago not to ask questions.
Art’s and my relationship progressed naturally, despite it being a dinner for my dad where we met, and it’s easy. He’s handsome. Nice. He remembers the small things: my schedule, my coffee order, the name of the line cook who annoys me.
ME:
Can’t wait. Usual place?
ART:
Wherever you want. I’m buying.
Chef Michel clears his throat, and I shove my phone into my pocket, my spine straightening like I’ve been electrocuted.
“Sorry, Chef.”
I focus back on my crème br?lée, but there’s still a skip in my heart because Art’s coming into town.
My hands move without conscious thought.
“Runner!”
The plate disappears down the line, and I’m already reaching for the next ticket, the next challenge, the next chance to prove I belong here.
By the time service ends, my feet are screaming, and my whites are splattered with enough butter to constitute a health code violation. But I’m grinning as I break down my station, still riding the high that only comes from a flawless service.
“You killed it tonight.” Danny, one of the other sous-chefs, bumps my shoulder as he passes. “That duck on table twelve? The guest sent compliments to the kitchen.”
My heart swells. “Seriously?”
“Chef Michel wants to see you in the office,” he says with a wide grin.
I try not to let the hope show too much on my face, but it’s hard.
Three years I’ve been working toward this.
Senior sous-chef at twenty-four, at one of the most respected restaurants in Boston isn’t just a promotion; it’s proof I deserve everything I’ve dreamed of.
I change out of my whites in the back room, checking my phone as I pull on my jeans.
ART:
How was work tonight?
I smile at the screen.
ME:
Chef Michel wants to “talk.” I think this might be it!
ART:
That’s my girl. You deserve it more than anyone.
ME:
Don’t jinx it.
ART:
Not jinxing. Call me when you’re home?
ME:
Always.
Nerves zing up my spine as I walk to the office and when I knock on the doorframe, Chef Michel holds up a finger. He’s on the phone, his back half turned to me, and I catch the tail end of whatever he’s saying.
“Yes. I understand. Are you sure we can’t… No, I wouldn’t want that… Of course, ma’am.”
When he hangs up and turns to me, his expression makes my stomach dip.
“You wanted to see me, Chef?”
He stares and rubs his chin. This already isn’t how I imagined this would go.
“Ginny.” He clears his throat. “In every chef’s life, there comes a time where staying stagnant isn’t beneficial to their long-term goals.”
My lungs cramp. This is it, oh my God.
“Would you agree?”
“Yes, Chef. Of course.”
“Good. Sometimes, it’s best for a pupil to spread their wings and try other avenues.”
“Yes.”
“I’m sorry, Genevieve,” he says at the same time I say, “I accept.”
My body locks up tight, and I laugh. “I’m sorry, I misheard you… What?”
He’s holding his phone in one hand and tapping it against the other, and he looks like he’d rather be anywhere else.
“We’re letting you go, Genevieve. You’re fired.”
The words don’t compute. They’re sounds without meaning, syllables that bounce off my eardrums and fall to the floor.
I laugh again, because this has to be a joke. “I don’t understand. You said last week my beurre blanc was the best you’d tasted since you’d visited Lyon. I’ve done everything to get this position.”
“I know what I said. This isn’t about your performance.”
The room tilts as I shove to a stand. “Then what’s it about?”
He doesn’t answer.
“If I did something wrong, just tell me. I can fix it. Whatever it is.”
“We’re done here.”
I want to argue. I want to demand answers. I want to do something other than sit here like an idiot while my entire world collapses around me. But I know Chef Michel well—have studied his every expression for years in order to appease him. There’s no winning this fight.
So I go.
I clean out my locker with numb fingers; a spare hair tie, a notebook of recipes, a photo of Art and me I’d taped to the inside of the door, and I walk out the back entrance, the same one I’ve used every single day for three years.
I stand in the alley, staring at the brick wall and the fire escape I once climbed with Danny to smoke a cigarette after a brutal shift.
And then it hits me. All at once, like a tsunami crashing over my head.
I’m never going back.
The sob tears out of me. I end up crouched against the wall, crying so hard I can barely breathe, while the kitchen I gave everything to carries along without me just a few feet away.
The next few weeks blur together in a haze of rejection and confusion. I apply to every restaurant in Boston worth working at, then the ones that aren’t, then the ones I swore I’d never set foot in—the tourist traps, the chains, the places where the food comes preportioned in plastic bags.
Nobody calls me back. Nobody will even entertain the thought of me.
And it’s only when I’ve finally accepted defeat that I walk into the front door of my father’s brownstone.
The lights are on in the kitchen.
“Papa?”
“In here, mon chou!”
His voice is jovial, and I find him at the stove, in his suit, tie loosened, and his sleeves rolled up, stirring something in a copper pot that smells like heaven.
There’s a whole spread on the counter.
Fresh bread, Brie, a salad. Red wine’s breathing on the table in a decanter I bought him last Christmas.
“You’re cooking?” I ask. “It’s almost ten thirty.”
He tsks but doesn’t stop stirring. “You think I’ll sleep knowing my daughter’s working herself to death and not eating properly?”
Work. That’s a generous term for it.
“Does it help if I say I made your favorite?”
I move closer, peering over his shoulder. “Coq au vin?”
It’s not my favorite, but I’ll never tell him otherwise.
It was the dish he made every time he needed to make something right when I was growing up, and I used to love it; the smell of herbs and wine filling the house meant he was home, at least for a night. A pause in whatever crisis had kept him gone or buried in phone calls behind closed doors.
But as I got older, the pattern stopped being comforting and started being obvious. Coq au vin meant he was apologizing without saying the words. It meant another long absence, another silent security detail shadowing me on routine errands.
And we never talked about any of it because we never really could.
He didn’t tell, and I didn’t ask, and somewhere along the way we made an unspoken pact to pretend the world he lived in and the world he made for me could stay separate.
And where does the coq au vin come in? Well, my mother died twenty-four years ago giving birth to me, so my father had to be both parents, and he did it the only way he knew how: through food.
He learned to cook from my grandmother in Lyon, and she learned from her mother, and so on and so forth, back through generations of people who believed that love was something you fed people.
“So,” my father says, cutting into his chicken. “Art’s in town, yes?”
I nod, mouth full.
“And he’ll be stealing you away from me again?”
“You can’t say it’s stealing when you’re the one who hooked us up.”
“‘Hooked us up.’ That makes it sound so casual.”
“We’re long distance, so it is kind of casual.”
My father waves a hand like he’s swatting a fly. “One year together isn’t casual, Genevieve. Don’t cheapen your choices or your relationship.”
Grinning, I take another bite, and his phone buzzes on the counter. He glances at it, and his expression changes to something harder.
Work mode.
“I need to take this. One moment.”
He steps out of the kitchen, his voice dropping to a murmur.
“—told you, I’ll get it handled.”
My fork freezes halfway to my mouth.
When my father comes back, his face is smooth again. “Sorry about that.”
“Sounded intense.”
“Defending the law sometimes is.”
The same fear I’ve always had about him and his work rushes through me, gripping my limbs in an icy hold. “Papa, promise me you’d tell me if you were ever in danger from your work.”
He sets down his fork. “If something were ever truly wrong, you’d know. I’d make sure of it.”
“Like a code word or what?”
He chuffs. “You watch too many movies.”