Fifty-Eight
FIFTY-EIGHT
Mia
WHAT WAS I, if I wasn’t a Michelin-star chef anymore? The question sounded ridiculous, even inside my own head.
Eventually, I’d cried myself out, cradled in the pack’s arms. My head hurt. My eyes hurt. Even worse, the scent of stale fry oil that I’d been too upset to wash off earlier was starting to gross me out.
“I’ve let this thing turn into my entire identity,” I realized, not liking how that thought made me feel. My voice was raspy, as though I’d been shrieking out my frustration to the heavens, instead of crying quietly into Emiel’s neck. “That’s... that’s bad, right?”
“Mia, no ,” Nat said, sounding upset.
“For what it’s worth, I never got that sense from you.” Zalen, who’d been smoothing his hand up and down my calf in a soothing rhythm, didn’t seem perturbed. “You were proud of the accomplishment, and rightly so. In my experience, people who are obsessed by their own news headlines don’t help track down missing cats, or hold pro-bono classes at the local youth center... or heal the hearts of a bunch of emotionally damaged men on their days off.”
I frowned, still not ready to lift my face away from Emiel’s warm skin.
“I still feel like a failure,” I admitted.
Nat made a noise of outrage. “Uh... hello ? The first Michelin star restaurant in Missouri? The third Michelin star omega head chef... in the entire world ? I don’t ever want to hear the word ‘failure’ come out of your mouth again, Mia. This was my fault, and frankly, the only failure was one of timing.”
“He’s got a point,” Luca said. “What were the odds that you’d have one bad night, and that would be the night the inspector showed up?”
It had been more than one bad night. But even so...
“The odds were one hundred percent, as it turned out,” I said dryly, finally surfacing from my hiding place against Emiel. I freed an arm, wiping at the wetness on my cheeks with the base of my thumb. God, I felt like crap—even if I’d needed the release of crying.
Emiel sat up, urging me to rest my head on his thigh so he could stroke blunt fingers through my hair.
“Does anything really have to change?” he asked. “For right now, I mean. The restaurant’s going good again, yeah? Except for some stupid guide book most people never even look at.”
“Yes,” Nat said firmly. “It is. Business has never been better. And we’ve got an employee who should probably be working in Silicon Valley, based on her social media marketing skills.” He paused, and then added, “Please don’t anyone tell Maleeka I said that. We can’t afford to lose her.”
I couldn’t help it; I let out a wet little laugh.
“My lips are sealed,” I promised.
“The point is,” Nat went on, “The Elderflower Inn is doing fine. We can keep going just as we are... or we can decide to do something different, if you’d rather. There’s no need to make a decision today.”
Everyone was quiet for a few moments, as I tried, without success, to picture what something different might look like.
Byron had been awfully quiet, but now he cleared his throat—drawing everyone’s attention.
“Sometimes the shittiest moments of your life can be the catalyst for change.” The words were oddly choked, as though he was having to force them out.
I didn’t want to hear them any more than he apparently wanted to say them... but maybe that was because of how hard they hit me.
“I’ll have to think about it,” I managed. “But not now. I smell like a commercial kitchen. I want a shower.”
Emiel nudged me off his lap and rose, holding a hand down to me. “C’mon, then. I’ll wash your hair.”
The following day, I dragged myself to the restaurant with bloodshot eyes and a lingering headache. Nat was a silent and supportive presence at my side.
Shani was the first to arrive, and her expression crumpled into a frown the moment she set eyes on me.
“Boss? What’s wrong?” she asked. “Has something happened?”
I tried to muster a smile for her. “It’s not on the scale of ‘gang members are sabotaging the restaurant and kidnapping people,’ but yes, there’s bad news. The new Michelin Guide posted yesterday, and we lost our star.”
“Oh, Mia,” she said. “I’m so sorry. Clearly, the Michelin people are idiots .”
I huffed a tiny breath of a laugh. “In their defense, it was pretty shambolic on the night the undercover inspector must have showed up. Which, I hasten to add, happened before you were hired.”
“Stars are hard to get and easy to lose,” Nat said, echoing my mantra over the past months. “For now, nothing has changed day to day. This restaurant serves the best food in the Midwest, and that’s thanks to every single member of the staff, from the head chef on down.”
“Amen to that,” Shani said. She squared her shoulders. “You want me to call a meeting before the lunch service starts?”
I shook my head. “No, we’ll hold it after close. It’ll just take a minute, but I want to give everyone some time to process the news, rather than hitting them with it at the beginning of the shift. Nat was thoughtful enough to do that for me yesterday, so we’ll do it for them, too.”
Shani reached out and squeezed my upper arm. “Hungry people don’t care about no stupid star in a guidebook. They just want good food and good vibes. Those, we’ve got—no matter what some inspector says.”
“Yes, we do,” I agreed, placing my hand over hers. “So, let’s get the lunch prep started. We’ve got customers to feed.”
Despite what I’d said, some insidious little voice in the back of my head had whispered that people would know... that the dining room would be empty, as some kind of invisible cosmic karma came back to bite us on the ass. Instead, it was a packed house, as it had been pretty much nonstop since the reopening.
So, why did it hurt me to even look around the place?
After the last customer had left, Nat gathered the staff and made the announcement. There was the expected amount of upset, even outrage—but it wasn’t personal to the others in the same way it was to me.
“We’ll get it back, though, right?” Candy asked, as though it was a foregone conclusion.
“That’s certainly a possibility,” Nat told her. “We’re already on the Guide’s radar, which puts us ahead of the curve.”
The level of exhaustion I felt at the prospect of fighting and scrambling to get that lost star back took me by surprise—although maybe it shouldn’t have.
I don’t know if I’ve got another Michelin star left in me at this point , I’d told Luca early in our acquaintance, shortly after I’d heard that the inspector might be in St. Louis.
Even with the other aspects of my life in a much better place than they had been, it still felt like the truth. Chasing that star to the exclusion of everything else had nearly destroyed me the first time.
“Can I ask you something? And you have to be honest in response,” I said, as Nat drove us back to Ladue that night.
“Of course. Always ,” he replied immediately. “Not talking honestly hasn’t worked out so well for us, in the past.”
I nodded, painfully aware of the fact.
“What if I did want to do something different?” I asked.
He was quiet for a couple of seconds before answering. “How do you mean?”
I chewed on my lower lip, rolling it back and forth between my teeth.
“It’s just... I don’t know how this is going to work with the others,” I said. “I mean, with our schedules hardly ever syncing up, and none of us getting enough sleep.”
Again, Nat took a long time to reply. When he did, he sounded tentative.
“I want to make it absolutely clear that I’ll support you in whatever you want to do.” His finger tapped the steering wheel restlessly. “So, when I say this, please believe that it’s in the spirit of wanting to understand; not trying to second guess you. But... Mia. World-class cooking is your passion. It has been for as long as I’ve known you. You’d go crazy within a month, trying to be some kind of pampered, stay-at-home omega.”
Right now, lazing around in bed all day and never doing anything more strenuous than throwing together dinner for six people sounded... pretty amazing, actually.
But, longer term, he was right.
“I’m not saying I want to sit around in a frilly robe eating bon-bons and watching daytime television,” I told him. “And I’m also not saying you’re wrong about me. But here’s the thing. Your skill set transfers to things other than running a restaurant. Mine... well. I don’t honestly know what ‘different’ would even look like for me. And that uncertainty is giving me indigestion—not gonna lie.”
He gave a slow nod, his attention focused on the road.
“I hear you. And I stand by what I said before. There’s no need to make a decision right away. But maybe we should talk to the others about it?” He sighed. “And not just about that. Things are still tight, with all the loans we’ve taken on over the years. While we may not be on the verge of bankruptcy anymore... what are we going to do about the house? Are we keeping it? Selling it? How are our finances going to work with the pack? We can’t just dump all our restaurant debt on Zalen. Like, ‘here, sorry, we suck at money, deal with it.’”
I chuckled. “Actually, I’m pretty sure we could do that, and he’d just nod and calmly fix everything for us. But I get what you’re saying. So... yeah. We’ll take our time and talk with the others before we make any big decisions.”
A part of me balked at dragging out the uncertainty even longer. But another tiny part held a flutter of excitement of what the future might look like, if we all negotiated it together.