Chapter 5
CHAPTER FIVE
Lennon
The fish is a problem.
Not a bad one. One where the answer exists, and I haven’t found it yet, which is different from when the answer doesn’t exist and you have to make peace with that.
I’ve had enough of that to last a while.
“The sauce is too sweet.” I sigh.
“The sauce is perfect,” Tessa counters.
“The sauce is too sweet, and you know it. The fish needs acid. Some bite underneath the butter.” I set down my spoon and look at the ceiling, thinking. “Capers. Or preserved lemon.”
We look at each other across the pass. “Preserved lemon,” we say in unison.
“Obviously preserved lemon.”
“Obviously.”
I’m in the kitchen of Maes & Vaughn at the end of a service that ran exactly right, and my best friend is here. We fixed a problem together in about four seconds, and this is the notebook—the actual restaurant. And it’s ours.
This is the dream.
I decide to let myself have it.
Picking up my spoon, I taste the sauce again. Yep. Almost perfect.
I grab a lemon when somewhere between one step and the next, the kitchen disappears like the end of a thought, or the way you sometimes find yourself in a room without remembering how you got there.
Now we’re in the restaurant’s dining room. Fairy lights are strung along the ceiling beams, and the tables are already set for tomorrow, glasses polished, everything in its place.
Apparently, we’ve sat down at a table. It’s the best one, the one with the garden view, and there’s a bottle of white wine that Tessa opens with confidence.
“The halibut goes on the permanent menu,” Tessa decides.
“When we fix the sauce.”
“When we fix the sauce. Which we already did. Preserved lemon, done, settled.”
“I want to test it first.”
“Lenny.”
“One test run.”
“You are constitutionally incapable of putting something on a menu without testing it seventeen times.”
“Fourteen,” I say. “Seventeen is an exaggeration.”
She raises an eyebrow. “The risotto.”
Instead of responding, I take a sip of wine, and she sits back, satisfied.
Because yeah, the risotto took nineteen tests, which is a number I’ve never said out loud and don’t intend to start now. She knows. She was there for at least six of them.
This is us. This has always been us—the argument that isn’t an argument, the back-and-forth that is really two people thinking together out loud. I have missed it so much that sitting in it now feels like pressing on a bruise.
“Tasting menu—” I start.
“Thursdays,” Tessa cuts me off.
“Eight covers.”
“Ten.”
“Eight.” I point my wine glass at her. “That’s intimate. Ten looks like we’re trying.”
She concedes this with a tilt of her glass. “Eight. But I want a bread course that means something.”
“Then we need a baker.”
“You can bake.”
“I can bake. I cannot bake bread. Those are different skills. And even if I wanted to try it, I’d need to get up at like four to be able to add that to my already full schedule.”
I think about someone who gets up before the sun without complaining, who makes things with their paint-streaked hands without needing to be asked. Then I don’t know who that would be and why I thought about that, so I move past it.
“We’d need someone who takes it seriously. Someone who understands that bread is not an afterthought.”
“We’ll find someone.” Tessa shrugs. “Just think about what you want, and it will happen.”
I look at her across the table. The one person I wanted for… how long? Years?
That doesn’t seem right. But she’s here. She’s real. She’s the Tessa who finishes my sentences, steals the last of the fish, and has opinions about everything and is never wrong about the ones that matter.
I want to stop time and just sit in this.
The fairy lights are doing something soft to the room, turning everything gold at the edges.
The bridge of my nose itches, and I glide a finger over it. For half a second, there’s a different pressure there, like a thumb, someone else’s. But then it’s my finger, nose, and the fairy lights.
I drop my hand to find Tessa is watching me with a slight smile.
“What?” I ask.
“Nothing.” She chuckles. “You just went somewhere.”
“I’m right here.”
“Mm.” She takes a sip of wine and doesn’t push it, which is generous of her.
My heart does a small flutter that I can’t explain. I look at my hand where it rests on the table. Five fingers. Lemon nails. Nothing unusual.
Tired, I tell myself. Long service. It’s late.
The garden door opens, and he’s already most of the way into the room before I clock the sound of it.
He’s carrying a single rose, deep red at the center, fading to gold at the tips.
He crosses to Tessa, sets it in front of her, and presses a kiss to her cheek with the ease of someone who’s done this a thousand times.
She beams at him. “You’re late.”
“I was in the garden.”
“For hours?”
“Finding the right one takes time.”
Why would he be out in the garden this late?
I turn to look out of the window, but where it should be night, it looks like the sun is beginning to set.
Weird.
He sits beside her and puts an arm around her shoulders, his gaze moving across the table, noticing the wine before his eyes find mine.
“Hello,” he greets as if he’s only now seeing me.
“Hi.”
“How was the service?”
“Good.” I fill the empty wine glass beside the bottle and push it toward him. “We figured out what the sauce needed.”
He takes a sip without hesitation as he considers it.
“Lemon.”
“Lemon. You okay, baby?”
The echo of that voice, filled with concern, washes over me, and I forget where I am.
“Lenny?”
I shake my head. “What?”
“I said,” he repeats mildly. “The sauce needs lemon.” He takes another sip. “Are you all right?”
“Fine.” I swirl the wine in my glass. “Just… tired.”
“She already knew.” Tessa shrugs. “She just needed someone else to say it.”
Something new in his eyes registers as he considers me that I don’t know what to do with. It’s not warmth, exactly, but more like interest.
“Tell me about yourself, Lenny.”
Something about hearing my nickname in his mouth makes me pause.
Did Tessa tell him to call me that?
“There’s not much to tell, and I bet Tessa told you enough.” I take a big sip. “Although I’d love to know more about you.”
He is my best friend’s… partner? Boyfriend?
But I don’t think I even know his name.
He tilts his head. “How about this? Tonight, you tell me about yourself. And next time, I’ll tell you about myself.” The corner of his mouth lifts. “We have forever to get to know each other.”
We have forever.
I turn the phrase over and find nothing wrong with it, exactly. It’s the faint impression of something with the word forever landing like a key in a lock you didn’t know was there. But then Tessa tops up my wine and smiles at me, so I tell him.
The restaurant in Boston. The five-star kitchen I clawed my way into through a decade of prep work, late nights, and being the youngest, the loudest, and the most stubborn person in every room I walked into.
He listens without glancing around the room, down at his glass, or giving attention to anything other than me.
There’s something about being listened to like that, without interruption or the small signals that tell you the other person is already preparing their response, that makes you say more than you planned to.
“You’re good at that,” I say, stopping myself.
“At what?”
“Listening.” I set my glass down.
Something crosses his face. Faint. There and gone. “So, it sounds like you had your dream job. But you left. Why?”
“My mother got sick. Then she died of…”
No.
Wait.
She’s still here.
I saw her yesterday. I think I saw—
“What did you love most?” he asks, cutting off the thought. “About the restaurant. The old job.”
“The people.” I don’t have to think about it.
“Not the guests. The kitchen. The insanity of people who choose to do this for a living. Who wake up every day and decide to stand in heat for ten hours because they love feeding people more than they love being comfortable.” I look at my glass.
“I’ve never found anything else that felt like that. ”
“Until now,” Tessa says with a grin.
“Until now,” I agree, warmth spreading in my chest as I return her smile.
“What do you miss?” He picks up the flower stem and turns it between his fingers, studying the petals.
“About the kitchen?”
“No.” He stops fiddling with the flower, and his green eyes find mine again. “In general. What is missing from your life right now?”
“My mother’s real laugh.” An easy, true answer.
A weird answer.
“What else?”
What else.
What else, what else.
My father’s voice. The last time I heard it was on the phone the morning he died, which I didn’t know would be the last time, so I wasn’t paying the right kind of attention.
I’ve been paying attention ever since to everything, all the time, just in case, and it’s exhausting.
It is genuinely exhausting to pay that much attention to everything.
“Feeling safe,” I hear myself say. “How you only feel safe when the people who made you are still alive. You know someone is always going to come if you call. And then they’re gone, and you realize you’ve been calling for them in small ways your whole life without knowing it, and now…”
I stop, and he continues to watch me steadily.
“Now what?” He prompts.
“Now you just call anyway. Into the quiet. And nothing answers, but you call anyway, because the habit of loving someone doesn’t stop just because they leave.”
Tessa’s hand finds mine on the tablecloth with a sad expression, but his expression is more open than I’ve ever seen from him. The careful facade of him is briefly and completely absent, and what’s underneath is something I don’t have a word for.
That surprised him.
I don’t know why I think that.
I don’t know what I said that did it.
“You should have more wine,” he says pleasantly after a beat of silence, facade back in place.
“I should,” I agree and empty my glass.
Hmm.
I still don’t know his name.