Chapter 12 #2
In all her years at Glut, Sam had been inside the office once, and that was only to pick up her first paycheck.
She couldn’t really remember what the place had looked like then, but she was pretty sure it was different now.
The walls were painted charcoal in an eggshell finish, and a large L-shaped glass-top desk sat off to one side of the room, anchoring a black-and-white checkerboard area rug.
On the wall hung framed starred reviews from the New York Times and clippings from other newspapers and magazines charting the restaurant’s history and success.
Photos, too. Pictures of Sam smiling beside world-renowned chefs like Gordon Ramsay and Thomas Keller and Rachael Ray and—was that Salt Bae ?
Seeing really was believing. It wasn’t that she hadn’t believed it before, but there was something about seeing it all with her own two eyes, the undeniable proof of her success, that made it feel real in a way that until this moment, it hadn’t.
Sam unbuttoned her coat on the way over to the desk and tossed it over the back of the chair, which she nudged to the side so she could stand in front of the computer.
More photos sat on the desk, pictures of her and Hannah on red carpets and on sandy beaches.
She nudged a framed photo of her proudly holding her James Beard award aside and jiggled the computer mouse, waking up the monitor.
Enter password.
Sam tried Hannah’s birth date, and when that didn’t work, she skipped straight to using her fingerprint to log in. Bingo. She was in.
Sam’s Gmail inbox was open on the screen, the last thing she must’ve been looking at when she was here last. There were a few unread messages, but not many.
It was the folder labeled COURTNEY with six emails in it that caught her eye.
Did she even know anyone named Courtney?
The most recent email in the folder was dated September twenty-first, and it was outgoing. Sam clicked on it.
From: Samantha Cooper samanthacooper @indulgehospitality.com
To: Coco Duquette [email protected]
Subject: Courtney Duckett
C,
We’ve known each other for what? Six years? And in all that time I had no idea that my esteemed colleague Coco Duquette was actually Courtney Duckett, daughter of Marcia, a middle school math teacher, and Robert Duckett, a mechanic.
Tell me, how does a girl from Hiawassee, Georgia, get such an impeccable French accent? Five years, C! Did you not feel like you could trust me? I mean, I had to hire a private investigator to find all of this out. If I’m being honest, I’m a little bummed. I thought we were closer than that.
But that’s not really the point of this email.
I wanted to reach out and personally congratulate you.
A cookbook deal! How exciting! And what a great name, A Taste of Alsace, a Taste of Home .
I’m sure peppered in between all those delicious and truly inimitable recipes, you’ll delight readers with stories of your childhood in France, all those summers spent visiting the winery that’s been in your family since the 1500s.
I’m sure readers are just going to gobble those up!
That is what you’ve built your brand on, isn’t it? Being French?
I know things have been contentious between us of late, but I really don’t want there to be any bad blood between us, C.
As a matter of fact, I’d love nothing more than to give your cookbook a shout-out once it releases.
Our styles do tend to be quite similar, after all.
Though perhaps you should refrain from claiming online that I stole your recipes.
Consider it a kindness to yourself. I’d hate to see your sales flop if readers lost faith in your credibility.
S
Her mind raced, thoughts spinning out wildly in every direction as she sank to her knees on the rug.
She wrote this? And she sent it? To Coco? Whose name was actually Courtney? And Sam knew all this because she’d hired a private investigator to dig up dirt on her so that she could blackmail her into silence? Because Coco was telling people that Sam stole her recipes?
None of it made any more sense the second, third, or fourth times Sam read the email than it had upon her first read.
She backed out, then clicked on the other five emails in the folder, starting with the first, the oldest. All professional correspondence between her and a Roman Poirot of Poirot Investigations, the private investigator she had hired to dig into Coco’s past. Sam’s initial inquiry and his acceptance of the job, the payment transaction details, a full background check with a photocopy of Coco/Courtney’s birth certificate attached—the proof was all there.
Sam chewed on her bottom lip and read the first email again, hoping that between now and the last time she’d read it, it would say something different. Exonerate her of wrongdoing.
It didn’t.
Innocent people didn’t resort to blackmail.
Innocent people didn’t have to resort to blackmail.
Innocent people didn’t and Sam had. Short of actual possession, she couldn’t fathom what would possess her to do a thing like this.
This wasn’t just mean; this was immoral.
And if you had asked her yesterday, it wasn’t who she was.
The taste of rust filled Sam’s mouth. She needed to get out of here. She needed air. She rose to her feet, knees weak, knuckles white as she gripped the edge of the desk so she wouldn’t fall.
Leaving Glut was a blur. She found herself standing in front of Father Fagan Park, at the corner of Prince Street and Sixth Avenue, several blocks from the restaurant, a little triangular green space with benches.
She took a seat, feet on the bench, knees drawn to her chin, face tucked away against the blustery wind that nipped at her nose.
This life of theirs, hers and Hannah’s, the life they’d built together, seemed, by all conventional measures, as close to perfect as a life could get.
Hannah seemed happy and Sam had everything she’d ever wanted, but—what good was a life, even one as seemingly perfect as theirs, built with stolen bricks?
The person looking back at her in the mirror, the one smiling in all those pictures, Sam didn’t know who she was. If what she’d just learned was true, she wasn’t sure she wanted to.
Be it for the better or not, everything had changed overnight, and Sam … Sam just needed a minute. She needed familiar.
“Cooper residence, Renée speaking.”
Sam scrunched her eyes shut and sucked in a shallow breath, tears sneaking up on her, pricking at the corners of her eyes.
“Hello? Is someone there?”
Sam swallowed hard. “Hi, Momma.”
“Samantha?” She sounded surprised. “Is that you?”
Sam had to laugh. “Don’t you check your caller ID?”
Sam knew she didn’t, knew her mom had a bad habit of answering the phone each time it rang, then bitchin’ afterward when it turned out to be a telemarketer or some cousin she didn’t want to talk to.
This was familiar. This was what Sam needed, even if for just a moment. To get her head screwed on straight.
“Is everything okay?” Mom asked instead of fussing at Sam to mind her mouth.
Sam covered the receiver when she coughed, clearing her throat. “Yeah. I’m—I’m okay. How are you doing?”
There was a beat of silence before Mom said, “I’m all right. Just surprised to hear your voice is all.”
A foreboding chill ran down her spine. “Surprised?”
“Sammie, baby, we haven’t heard from you in six months.”
“What?” She exhaled sharply, breath escaping in a misty puff. “I—six months?”
That couldn’t be right. It couldn’t.
“Going on seven,” she said, and Sam’s heart sank. “But your daddy and I, everybody, we all know you’re busy. I suppose it is what it is.”
No, there was no it is what it is about it. On no planet would Sam ever be too busy to call her mom for six days, let alone six months. Seven.
“For a second, I thought you might be calling about … well …” She trailed off like Sam wasn’t sitting here hanging on her every word.
“Calling about what?”
Mom sighed, the sound explosive over the line, crackling in Sam’s ear like Mom’s mouth was right up against the receiver. “Have you talked to your sister? She said she was gonna reach out.”
Sam closed her eyes. She didn’t know.
“Kels?” she asked. “Or Jennie?”
“Kelsey. She was gonna try to get ahold of you.”
Try. As if Sam wouldn’t drop everything if either of her sisters needed her.
“What did she need to get ahold of me for?”
“I—Look, Sammie,” Mom said. “Maybe you ought to just call her.”
Her chest tightened and she just knew in her gut that something awful had happened. Otherwise, her mom would’ve spit it out.
“Tell me?” she begged. “Please.”
“It’s Pumpkin,” she said, and Sam’s heart stopped. “He’s not doing too well. UTI gone bad. We got him on meds, but it moved fast. The vet thinks the right thing to do would be … he thinks we should do it this afternoon, Sam.”
“No. Mm-mm.”
Sam shook her head, not giving a damn that her mom was more than a thousand miles away on the other end of the phone.
Pumpkin was here at the vet, the one across the street from Trader Joe’s.
He was getting his teeth cleaned. And Sam was supposed to pick him up as soon as they called, which should have happened yesterday, but in the chaos of it all, it had slipped her mind.
She was going to call today as soon as they opened to find out why they hadn’t reached out, and then she was going to pick him and Nacho up and bring them home. Where they belonged.
“That’s not …” Sam pinched her eyes shut and sucked in a messy breath that turned into a hiccup. All she could taste was rust and salt. “ Mom. ”
“Kels knows you gave Pumpkin and Nacho to her, that you didn’t want—Well, she thought you might still want to say goodbye. Thought you could …”
Mom kept talking but Sam couldn’t hear a word she was saying.
She couldn’t conceive of a world in which she’d give her cats up any more than she could conceive of one where she’d lie or steal to get to the top.
This would never happen.
This was bullshit , and Sam …
Sam called shenanigans.