Chapter 13
Isabelle
The table has split along natural lines over the last half hour, the way tables do when the group is big enough and the drinks are good enough and everyone is comfortable. Alex and Jack are at the far end, deep in a conversation about Jack's upcoming championship race in LA.
Alex showed me photos earlier of his two nieces from his brother Theo—Chloe and Clara—and a new baby nephew from his brother Calvin. And then the dogs, Gus and Laila. It's just who he is, the kind of person whose life is built around the people he loves.
Watching him with Jack tonight, the way they talk over each other and reference disasters from fifteen years ago and laugh at jokes nobody else at the table understands, I keep thinking that I don't have this.
I've never been great at making friends. I don't know why exactly. I want to be. I see other women who have those effortless, text-all-day, show-up-with-wine friendships and I think, how? How do you just do that? What's the secret I missed?
I have a few people in New York I get dinner with occasionally, colleagues mostly, but nobody I'd call at two in the morning, nobody who knows what I look like when I cry, nobody I've ever admitted to that I sleep with a stuffed rabbit named Monsieur Lapin that I've had since I was four.
Margot was the first person in a long time who felt easy, who I didn't have to perform around.
And now Mia and Lark, sitting across from me on a Monday night, talking to me like I've been in their group chat for months, and I keep catching myself mid-laugh thinking, oh, this is what it's supposed to feel like.
Mia is telling me about the music video she's working on with Lark, a piano ballad that they're pairing with contemporary dance. She lights up when she talks about dance, and Lark gets the same way about her music, her eyes going bright when she describes the melody she's been working on.
Their creative energy is infectious. It makes me want to be around them more, which is a feeling I'm not used to having about people I just met.
Mia's phone buzzes and she glances at it, smiling softly. "Derek wants to know if I'm having fun. He's in LA being boring without me."
"You two are cute, in an insane sort of way," Lark says, reaching for her water glass.
"We're chaotic," Mia corrects, then looks at me with a grin. "We're very on again, off again, currently very on. He's a choreographer and we keep swearing we won't work together again because it always ends in a fight, and then we do anyway and it's a whole thing."
She tucks her phone away and leans forward conspiratorially, pulling Lark in by the elbow with one hand and gesturing me closer with the other. I find myself leaning in too, the three of us hunched together like teenagers at the back of a classroom about to share contraband.
"So," Mia says, dropping her voice to a whisper that barely carries over the cumbia. "You and the hot chef."
I choke on my wine. Lark giggles. And that annoying voice in the back of my head, the one who has been insisting for days that I have a crush and who I have been diligently ignoring, perks up like a dog who just heard a treat bag open. Oh good, she says. Someone else noticed. How validating.
"Nothing's going on," I manage, wiping my mouth. "He's been surprisingly helpful and didn't backstab me to my father, which is a low bar but one that most men in my life have failed to clear."
"Mm-hm." Mia takes a slow sip of her pisco sour, her eyes never leaving my face. "But you slept with him, right?"
"What?" It comes out louder than I intend and Alex glances over from the other end of the table, eyebrows raised in question. I plaster on a smile and give him a small wave and he turns back to Jack. I lean in closer to Mia and Lark, dropping my voice. "How would you possibly know that?"
Mia looks absolutely delighted, practically bouncing in her seat. “Because I'm very intuitive. Borderline psychic, actually. I can pick up on sexual tension from a mile away and you two are radiating it like a space heater."
Lark's eyes go wide. "Wait, seriously? You slept with him?"
They're both looking at me with identical expressions of gleeful expectation, leaning so far forward they're practically in my lap, and my resolve—which has survived Jean-Pierre Beaumont and Michelin inspectors and a legitimate kitchen fire in Lyon—crumbles in approximately two seconds.
"Okay, yes," I say, surrendering completely. "But it was a one-time thing. We both agreed."
Mia squeals a bit, and Lark sits back, smiling.
"For what it's worth,” Lark says. “Dating a Midnight man is pretty damn great. And Alex is a good egg."
"I'm more of a casual person myself," Mia says, waving her hand, "but I love love. And flirting. And good sex. Honestly I just support all forms of human connection."
"Well, I'm more of a solo-with-my-vibrator type of person," I say, and they both burst out laughing.
Lark wipes her eyes. "God, I like you."
"The feeling is mutual," I say. Then I make the mistake of glancing down the table at Alex, who's mid-story about something, gesturing with his hands, and Jack is laughing so hard he's nearly choking on his drink.
And there’s a warmth spreading through my chest that has nothing to do with the pisco sours.
But a crush is the enemy of the plan, and the plan is New York and the flagship restaurant and the career I've been building since I was nineteen. A crush on a man who lives in Washington and works for my father is not part of any version of the plan.
But the wine and the warmth of this table are making honesty dangerously easy tonight, and if I'm being honest with myself—which I'm trying very hard not to be—this is the most fun I've had in longer than I want to admit.
It was just a one-time thing, I remind myself. Out of our systems.
The voice in my head snorts. She doesn't believe me. I'm starting not to believe me either.
Just when I think the evening might be dying down, Lark announces that she wants to go see a musician she's been dying to catch live, an indie artist playing at a venue in the Fillmore district. She pulls up the listing on her phone and holds it out to the table, eyes bright.
"He's only in San Francisco tonight," Lark says, looking around the table earnestly. "I will literally not forgive myself if I miss this."
"Done," Jack says, already signaling for the check.
"I'm in," Mia says, grabbing her jacket off the back of her chair. "I don't know who this person is but I trust Lark's taste implicitly and I'm not ready for tonight to be over."
Alex leans toward me, his shoulder brushing mine, and his voice drops lower. "No pressure if you want to head back to the hotel..."
"Let's go," I say, and his face breaks into a grin that does unfortunate things to my heart rate.
I should say no. I should go back to the hotel and sleep because tomorrow is prep day and I haven't had more than five hours of sleep in a week.
Responsible Isabelle, the one with the color-coded notebooks and the laminated timeline on her wall, would be appalled at the idea of going to a club at eleven at night when there's a menu to finalize.
Responsible Isabelle can go to hell.
We pay the bill and pile out onto the sidewalk in a laughing, chaotic mass.
The fog has come in while we were eating, turning the streetlights into soft halos and putting a chill in the air that cuts right through my blouse.
I shiver involuntarily and Alex notices immediately, starting to shrug out of his jacket, but I wave him off before he can finish the gesture because accepting his jacket feels like crossing a line I'm not ready to acknowledge exists.
The venue is tucked on a side street in the Fillmore, the kind of place you'd walk right past if you didn't know it was there.
But tonight you'd hear it from half a block away—bass thumping through the walls, the muffled roar of a crowd, warm light spilling from the door every time someone pushes through.
There's a line snaking down the sidewalk, maybe forty people deep, all of them looking cold and impatient.
But Jack says something to the guy at the door, who's built like a linebacker and wearing all black.
The guy glances at him, does a visible double take, and waves us through immediately without checking IDs or asking questions.
Inside, it hits me all at once. The noise, the heat, the press of bodies. The ceiling is high, the room bigger than it looked from outside, all exposed pipes and old brick and a long bar running the length of the left wall.
The stage at the far end has a band mid-set—not the artist Lark came for, just an opener. But they're good, guitar-driven and loud and electric, with a fiddle threaded through the mix that gives the whole thing a stomping, Celtic-inflected energy that makes the floor vibrate under my feet.
The floor in front of the stage is a mass of people moving, not club dancing exactly, more joyful than that. People grabbing each other's hands and twirling and laughing and bumping into strangers and not caring.
"Oh, I love it here already!" Mia exclaims, squeezing my arm hard enough to bruise.
"He goes on at midnight or so," Lark says, checking her phone. "So we've got an hour to kill."
"Perfect," Jack says. "Drinks first, then we can stake out a spot closer to the stage."
Alex leans close to my ear, close enough that I can feel the warmth of his breath. "What are you drinking?"
"Negroni sbagliato," I say.
"Good choice," he says, and disappears into the crush at the bar, weaving through bodies with the ease of someone who's worked enough restaurant floors to navigate crowds in his sleep.