Chapter 7
Ispent the next morning browsing the markets in St. Germain, picking up tomatoes, apples, and anise.
My favorite cheesemonger was there, and although I was well stocked, I chatted with him, discussing the new Camembert he was expecting and sampling the slivers of different varieties he pressed on me.
Afterwards, I went for a stroll along the Quai de la Mégisserie and popped into several of the small flower shops, their greenery spilling into the streets. At the final one, I purchased a gorgeous bouquet of pale pink Japanese anemones. The owner wrapped them up for me in brown paper.
I returned to my apartment in the afternoon. As (terrible) luck would have it, Laurent Roche was just stepping out of his own apartment. I gave a brief nod, then went to unlock my door as quickly as possible. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw him pause.
“Mademoiselle Delcour?” He said my name like a question. To be honest, I was surprised he remembered it.
“Yes?” I turned to face him, wondering what I could have done to annoy him this time.
“Your macarons. The ones you made. They were very good.” Monsieur Roche’s brow was furrowed, as though he couldn’t quite believe he was saying something nice to me. That made two of us.
“Oh. Thank you.”
He was still frowning, his golden eyes glimmering beneath his brow. “Good food deserves to be complimented.”
He spoke as solemnly as if he was giving a sermon at a graveside. If I hadn’t been caught so off guard by his praise, I would have laughed at his seriousness. I half expected him to start intoning a hymn next.
Monsieur Roche’s politeness quota for the day apparently met, he gave me a stiff nod and started to close his door.
“Hey,” he said, pausing with the door nearly closed. He was speaking to someone inside. “You should still be napping.”
I’m not sure what I was expecting to appear—a child? A tousled lover?—but it certainly wasn’t the small, scruffy gray cat that appeared in the doorway. The animal meowed forlornly, showing a pink mouth.
Sighing, Monsieur Roche picked up the cat and held it to his chest.
“You have a cat?”
Something strange was happening with my emotions. As I watched the little creature butt Laurent under the chin, I suddenly remembered my own childhood cat. His name was Jacques.
We only had him when I was very young, but I remembered him sitting on the countertop as my mother taught me how to laminate dough for croissants, his glossy black fur dusted with flour. Every night he’d slept in my bed, his warm little body curled at my feet.
We couldn’t take Jacques with us when we’d left Paris, and I’d been devastated to leave him with our neighbors.
For years after that, I’d begged my mother to adopt a new cat, but she (rightly) said we moved too often for a pet.
Eventually, I gave up, and Jacques faded to the back of my memory. Funny how that happens.
Jolting me back to the present, Laurent looked up just then and smiled—actually smiled—at me.
His teeth were slightly crooked. Despite the world’s growing preference for perfectly straight, perfectly white rows of teeth, I still preferred an imperfect smile.
And Monsieur Roche’s certainly did wonders. His smile transformed him from a scowling, solemn office drone to an actual human who looked like he might crack a joke at a posh restaurant then raise an eyebrow when you burst into laughter and the other diners glared.
“This is Minerva,” he said, stroking the cat, who began to purr as he ruffled her fur. “She’s incredibly spoiled. I found her poking around trashcans for scraps as a kitten, and now her favorite food is coq au vin, cooled to just above room temperature.”
He looked down at his little cat and smiled again. I did not think him a man for dimples; his carved features suggested stone and ice more than any hint of softness, but a dimple he had, right on his left cheek. It made him—was it possible?—ever so slightly adorable.
I made a split-second decision. It was the dimple that made me do it. That and how much he clearly loved his cat.
“Monsieur Roche, would you like to come over some evening for dinner? I’m not as good at cooking as I am at baking, but you’ll be able to give the takeaway shops an evening off.” I laughed a little, the joke not landing quite as I wanted it to.
The smile slipped from Laurent’s face, and he was back to being all angles and hard lines.
He and Minerva both blinked their golden eyes.
“Well…” He brushed a stray curl from his forehead.
“That’s possible, although it might be difficult to find an evening that fits our schedules. Work takes up a lot of my time.”
I blinked. What an odd thing to say, especially for a Frenchman.
It was nearly unpatriotic. I had never known a fellow countryman to decline an open dinner invitation due to busy schedules.
Half the country would probably be willing to cancel their plans and sit down to a meal right this very moment if promised decent wine and a fresh baguette.
Monsieur Roche was staring at his shoes, which had been burnished to a high sheen. “I’ll look into it,” he said finally, his tone suggesting that he’d rather be eaten alive by vultures than spend another minute considering the idea. “I should go now.”
Still not meeting my eyes, Laurent Roche gently placed Minerva back inside. He shut the door and slipped past me. In another moment he was on the street, walking quickly without looking back.
***
“He what?” Yasmine said, eyebrows raised high. “No, tell the story again, you must have told it wrong.”
It was several hours later, and the Le Jules Verne staff was sitting together for a glass of wine before guests began arriving for dinner service.
I had only meant to tell Yasmine about my run-in with Laurent Roche, but it was nearly impossible to say anything in private at the restaurant.
The rest of the servers had quickly come over to listen.
“And I thought the rejection I got last weekend from the guy at my gym was brutal,” Luc put in.
“It wasn’t a date. It was just a neighborly invitation,” I said.
“Even worse,” Luc declared. “There could be all kinds of reasons for turning down a date, but when it’s just a dinner invite, you know it’s only because he hates you.”
“He told you that he was too busy?” Paul repeated. “This is not a Frenchman. Are you sure he’s not some Brit or American in disguise?”
“Maybe he doesn’t like eating in other people’s homes,” Colette said as she applied lipstick. “My grandmother was a picky eater, and she only liked food she made herself.”
“Oh,” I said, realizing something. “He did try my food, actually. I had extra macarons, and when we met, I thought I’d do something nice, so I gave them to him. He told me he liked them, but…”
In my head, I replayed my conversation with Laurent. What had I been thinking? He was a posh businessman who was probably used to dining in Paris’ best restaurants every night. And I’d forced half a dozen sad, squashed macarons on him.
How pathetic. He probably felt bad for me. That’s why he’d complimented me. Like a parent accepting an inedible creation from their child but not wanting to break their heart.
Oh, God. This was a low point. I’d rather go back to him communicating only in scowls.
As I sat, staring into the void as my coworkers debated what could make a man turn down a dinner invitation, Chef La Croix came in and bellowed at us to get ready for the first diners.
Last night, after dinner service had ended, Chef La Croix had given me a loud and public dressing down for letting Mateo and Anna onto the terrace.
He’d achieved impressive feats of theatrics (“And if they’d fallen off the Tower, Margot, what would have happened then?
You would have gone straight to jail, and I wouldn’t have shed a single tear over you.
”), and I’d made sure to look appropriately cowed.
He gave me an extra stern look this evening.
I managed to plaster on my sunniest smile in return, but my heart wasn’t in it.
Dinner service started off poorly, with a guest handing me a napkin dripping with snot and telling me to get them a new one.
“Things can only go up from here,” I told myself as I scrubbed my hands under scalding water in the staff bathroom.
“I have news for you,” Yasmine said as we passed each other in the kitchens.
“If it’s that table seventeen still wants yellow mustard instead of Dijon, I already told them we don’t have any,” I responded. And the next time they want yellow mustard, they should try a ballpark.
“No, not about work. Well, it’s work, but not this work,” Yasmine said enigmatically, then rushed off.
An hour later, we passed each other again. “You know that charity my mom is part of? The one that helps refugees get settled in France?”
“Of course,” I said, looking around the kitchen for paper napkins because one of my tables “didn’t like how cloth napkins felt.”
“They’re having their annual fundraising gala this spring. Food, drinks, auction, live music, the works.”
“Yes? You want me to go with you?” I guessed, taking the two plates a sous chef held out to me.
“No, their pastry chef just dropped out. I told them you’d be great for it.”
I nearly dropped the plates. “Wait, what?”
But Yasmine was already gone.
“Yasmine, absolutely not,” I said later, as we guzzled water during a quick break.
“Why not? You’re a fabulous baker.”
“Only for fun,” I said quickly. I remembered Monsieur Roche and his firm refusal of a home-cooked meal. “And maybe not even for that.”
“Margot, come on. You bake all the time. I have no doubt you’ll amaze them.”
I shook my head. My fingers clenched around my water glass. “I don’t have a certified kitchen space or—”
“You’ll use theirs,” Yasmine cut in. “And I know you already have your commercial baking license. I heard you mention it to diners once.”
Merde.
That had been a throwaway remark I’d immediately regretted. Not because it wasn’t true—I did have my commercial baking license—but because I hated to remember the time during my life when I’d gotten it.
“Just think about it,” Yasmine said.
I didn’t need to think about it. The idea sent a knot of panic twisting in my stomach.
I forced a shrug, keeping my voice light. “Yasmine, I just don’t think I’m up for it.” I saw her open her mouth to argue and took the chance to escape. “Sorry, I have to run. Table three is waiting for their next course.”
I got through the rest of my shift by thinking of nothing else than bringing out courses, explaining the food, and refilling water glasses. At the end of the night, I tried to slink out, but Yasmine caught me before I’d taken two steps from the staff room.
“Margot,” she said, frowning. “Why don’t you want to do this? You’re always willing to help me with anything.”
I fiddled with my coat sleeves. “I just don’t want to.”
It wasn’t exactly a lie.
Yasmine studied me. For a second, I thought she was about to push. Instead, she softened. “Margot, they’re desperate. Seriously, just do your best, and they’ll be thrilled with whatever you bake. It’s for a good cause.”
I shook my head, but she kept going.
“Look, why don’t you just come to an orientation meeting with me? No pressure. If you still don’t want to do it, I’ll never mention it again for as long as I live.”
I shifted uncomfortably. But Yasmine was right; just attending a meeting wasn’t stressful. Or it shouldn’t be. And I was perpetually a sucker for good causes.
“Will there be free food?” I asked warily.
“Mountains of it,” Yasmine said, crossing her heart with her index finger.
I hesitated a moment longer.
“Alright,” I sighed. “Just the meeting. That’s all I’m promising.”
Yasmine clapped her hands and kissed me on both cheeks.
***
Thus, that weekend, at an hour when I was usually still sleeping or lazing about in bed, I found myself walking into an aging office building, wondering why I had ever agreed to this.
“The culinary team is meeting in room 24,” Yasmine said, leading me firmly by the arm as though I might abscond at any moment.
Which, to be honest, had been on my mind.
“Yasmine, I appreciate your confidence in me, but this is a terrible idea. Everyone else is going to be a professional.”
“Not at all. My mother told me half the sous chefs are still in school or only work in kitchens on the side. Plus, the only reason you aren’t a professional is because you haven’t gone to pastry school. You’d blow them all out of the water.”
My stomach churned. “I only promised I’d go to this meeting. Nothing else.”
“I know,” Yasmine said serenely. “And we’ll stuff our faces after the meeting’s over. Come on, the room’s right here.”
I wanted to say something more, to impress upon Yasmine that there was really no chance that I’d ever end up as pastry chef for this event, but she was already dragging me into the room.
Well, she’d realize I was serious when I didn’t change my mind.
As I entered a room filled with tables, I was still half-distracted as Yasmine led us to a pair of empty seats. It wasn’t until I had settled into my chair that I remembered my manners and turned to greet the person seated on my other side.
The man’s head turned, and I found myself looking into Laurent Roche’s gold-flecked eyes.