Chapter 11 #2
“Y’all can relax. I’m not here to inspect anybody or …
” Her eye snagged on a stick of butter sitting on the prep counter where she had once worked.
Standing there now was a young woman, probably no older than twenty-two, with an abundance of dark curly hair, smooth light-brown skin, and round cheeks.
When she noticed Sam looking, like a deer in the headlights, she froze, eyes suddenly wide with fear.
“I-is there something, Chef?” she stammered.
“No! You’re, um. Well.” Sam cringed. To say everything was fine would be a lie. She gestured to her mise en place. “Are you making cookies, by chance …?”
“Nina. Flores. And no. I was making piecrust.”
“Right.” Sam nodded like she remembered. “I could be wrong, but I think your butter might be just a teeny bit warm, Nina.”
The pea-size pieces of butter were melting into her flour instead of staying whole and crumbly like sand. Her piecrust would be dense and doughy instead of flaky the way it was meant to be.
Nina paled. “Sorry, Chef. I’ll fix that.”
The poor girl was shaking like a leaf.
It didn’t take a genius to be able to tell that Sam was making everyone uncomfortable, and that was making her uncomfortable.
“All right.” Sam scratched the side of her neck. “I guess, I’ll, uh, get out of your—” Her eyes swept the room, taking in faces, new and familiar alike. “Hey, where’s Coco?”
She hadn’t thought it possible for the atmosphere inside the kitchen to grow more tense than it already was, but somehow it did, the room temperature feeling like it dropped several degrees.
Felix and Oslo wore matching frowns, goggling at her like she’d lost her mind, while Javier stared at the cutting board in front of him like he was trying to will himself out of the room.
Melissa gaped at her. “How would we know where … Well, she’s not here . Obviously.”
Obviously.
The only thing obvious was that Sam needed to get out of this kitchen.
“Right. I knew that. I just thought …” Sam forced a laugh. “Never mind.”
Melissa nodded slowly, looking askance at her. “Are you … feeling okay, Chef Cooper?”
Sam shuffled her feet, inching in the direction of the door.
“I’m fine. But I just remembered there’s somewhere I’m supposed to be.
” She jerked her thumb over her shoulder.
“So I’m going to go there and do the thing I’m supposed to do and I’ll just …
” She gave the kitchen a thumbs-up. “Leave y’all to it. ”
Sam trailed after the hostess, following her through the restaurant to a table in the corner where Hannah was already seated booth side, on her phone, staring intently at something on the screen.
She looked up, spotted Sam, and it was like watching the sunrise the way a bright smile lit up her whole face, measure by measure.
Sam’s heart beat double time.
Hannah looked gorgeous, but when didn’t she? Her hair was pulled back in a chic chignon, loose wisps highlighted the color of wild honey framing her face.
Her eyes swept over Sam, and slowly, her head listed to one side. “Baby,” Hannah greeted her and gave a gentle, if not puzzled, laugh. “What are you wearing?”
“This?” Sam looked down at her outfit. She was holding her coat and wearing a cream-colored short-sleeved sweater with black scalloped trim at the neck and sleeves, French tucked into her high-waisted indigo-rinse jeans. It was cute … she’d thought. “Is there something wrong with it?”
“Nothing, just that you’re wearing my top. Which is fine.” She paused. “What happened to that dress I got you from the L’Agence sample sale last week? I laid it out.”
Sam slipped into the chair across from Hannah. “A dress … and you … you laid it out.”
Like in most apartments in the city, closet space was limited, and Hannah’s wardrobe had always occupied closer to two-thirds than half.
Which had never bothered Sam until this morning when she opened the closet and had a minor anxiety attack that she didn’t actually live with Hannah in this apartment because Hannah’s clothes had overtaken the space entirely.
It was only when she had found these jeans, this pair she hadn’t worn in years, that she calmed.
Sam, who had never cared much about what she wore as long as it was clean and comfortable and not an eyesore (or, God forbid, Louisiana-Monroe Warhawks maroon and gold), didn’t mind upping her fashion game for Hannah. Not at all.
But dresses had always been where Sam had drawn the line, no matter who was trying to dress her and no matter their intentions.
As soon as Sam pulled a dress on over her head, she was transported back to sitting on a too-hard church pew, lace itching her in places she couldn’t scratch, squirming inside, feeling anything but like herself.
“The olive-green one, remember? You told me you liked the boning in the bodice. The cleaners dropped it off yesterday, so I left it hanging on the back of the door because I thought you said you wanted to wear it tonight.”
“The boning in the bodice.” Sam could scarcely imagine words less likely to come out of her mouth.
“Olive green …” She laughed. “Oh, duh. The olive-green one. Right. Completely slipped my mind.” She ran her fingers down the front of her— Hannah’s —sweater, smoothing a wrinkle in the wool.
“I hope you don’t mind that I borrowed this. ”
Hannah smiled. “How was your day?”
“It was, you know.” There was an open bottle of red wine on the table, a nice-looking Cabernet, and Sam reached for it, filling her glass. “It was a day. I’d rather hear about yours.”
And the less Sam talked about herself, the better.
“It was a day,” Hannah joked. “No, it was good. My meeting this morning went stellar, I swear the massage I had changed my life, and I had some really exciting phone calls, but I didn’t want to spring too much good news on you as soon as you sat down.”
“I like good news.”
“You’re so impatient. Later.” Hannah smiled. “How’d the croquembouche turn out?”
“What?”
“You said that’s what you were recording today, didn’t you?”
Recording, right. “Change of plans, actually. I … I actually stopped by Glut. To, you know, see how things were going.”
“And?”
After leaving Glut, the first thing Sam had done was look Coco up online. Her Instagram profile was set to private, and Sam wasn’t following her, so dead end there, but according to LinkedIn, she’d stopped working at Glut six months ago. No current job had been listed.
“And … I don’t know.” Sam hedged. She should probably count Coco’s absence in her life as a blessing, but she was curious. “Everyone got really weird when I brought up Coco. I mean, Melissa looked like she’d seen a ghost or something.”
“No shit.” Hannah lowered her wineglass, staring incredulously across the table. “My God, I’d be surprised if Melissa didn’t look totally weirded out. Jesus.”
Holy shit, was Coco dead ?
Sam hated her more than just about anybody on this planet; she’d love nothing more than for Coco Duquette to move somewhere far, far away. To Timbuktu, maybe. But dead ? Sam genuinely didn’t want that.
“What she did to you was terrible, Sam. I can’t believe you brought her up.”
Not dead, then. Just a bitch. Still a bitch. No surprise there.
Hannah pursed her glossed lips. “Why are you even thinking about her?”
Because there was an afterimage of the two of them tangled up in bedsheets imprinted on the back of Sam’s eyelids that she saw each time she blinked.
She took a sip of wine, trying to wash the bad taste out of her mouth. “No reason.”
Hannah reached across the table for her hand. “Coco is nothing more than a two-faced bitch, and you, my love, need to let sleeping dogs lie. Move on.”
What in the world did Coco do to her?
“I mean, it wasn’t that bad. What she did.” She was fishing, living on a hope and a prayer that Coco might be a perpetual pain in Sam’s ass, but she didn’t have it in her to be truly heinous. “I mean, it’s not like she stole my recipes and pawned them off as hers or something.”
Hannah slipped her hand free of Sam’s and scowled. “That’s not funny, Sam.”
No freaking way. Coco actually stole her recipes? What a bitch.
“No, you’re right,” she said. “That’s not funny.”
It was god-awful was what it was. Stealing recipes Sam had worked damn hard on?
Despicable. Not just stealing but lying about it?
Claiming ownership? It took someone truly low to do a thing like that.
No wonder everyone was acting weird about it; clearly Coco was persona non grata in Sam’s life. For good reason.
Hannah nodded. “Let’s leave the past where it belongs and focus on our future, okay?”
Our future. She did like the sound of that.
“You’re right.” Sam flashed her a smile. “I’m being silly.”
The waiter appeared to take their order. Hannah asked for the asparagus and crab salad and Sam considered the miso carbonara before ordering the slow-roasted celeriac and radish salad instead.
“Jonah called me today,” Hannah said when the waiter left.
Was she supposed to know who Jonah was?
“Casting director at Bravo?” Exasperation seeped into Hannah’s voice. “You know. Jonah.”
“Jonah. Of course.” What the fuck? “And what did Jonah at Bravo have to say?”
“They want you.” Hannah’s knee bounced against Sam’s under the table. “ Top freaking Chef , Sam.”
Christ on a cracker.
Hannah’s smile wavered. “Aren’t you excited?”
This Sam probably should be, but after her last cookingcompetition experience, she could scarcely imagine anything she wanted to do less than compete in another. “I’m … speechless.”
That was good enough for Hannah. She leaned across the table and clinked her glass against Sam’s.
“To us. May all the pieces of our five-year plan continue to fall perfectly into place.” She sat back in the booth and stared at Sam with a dreamy smile.
“Jonah also said the network is, and I quote, ‘strongly considering’ me for the next season of Housewives .” She clapped her hands and squealed. “Can you believe it? Housewives , Sam!”