CHAPTER 9
Sebastian
WHENEVER THINGS WERE GOING WELL, DISASTER inevitably struck.
Usually, bad news had the courtesy of waiting a month or two before it swooped in, but this time, it reared its ugly head a mere week after our collab announcement.
“I’m so sorry, Sebastian.” Derek sounded wretched, like he’d gone on a bender and hadn’t slept in days. Which was true, in a way. “I hate to leave you in the lurch like this, but I have to check into rehab tomorrow. I got my third DUI last night, and if I don’t go, I’ll end up in jail instead.”
A vein pulsed in my forehead. I gripped my phone, willing myself not to march over to his house in Jersey and shove it down his throat.
I wasn’t typically a violent person, but what. The. Fuck.
How could the clean-cut, perennially good-natured Derek have that many DUIs under his belt? Worse, how could I not have not known about them?
Being a chef was a high-stress job, and there was a significant rate of substance abuse in the industry. It wasn’t always obvious, but I should’ve dug deeper and investigated more before I tapped him to be the face of our new line.
We were already under the gun with the product launch, and now we were up shit creek without a paddle.
“I’m sorry,” he repeated, sounding morose. “I really wish I could work on this new line, but I’ll have to be in rehab for at least a month.”
“It’s fine.” It’s not fine. “You have to do what’s best for you. I’ll figure this out.”
“Thanks. Listen, I had some ideas I was working on before, uh, you know. I can send them over in case they can help my replacement.”
His replacement. I had to convince a whole new chef to work on this project with an even tighter deadline than the first time around. Plus, Maya and I would have to brainstorm a second announcement that didn’t make us sound like we were in over our heads—which we were.
A throb of panic joined the pulsing vein in my forehead.
“Sure.” I forced a smile even though Derek couldn’t see me. Yelling at him wouldn’t change anything. I’d rather save my energy for convincing his successor, whoever that might be. “Email me.”
I hung up and immediately called Maya. We weren’t scheduled to meet until tomorrow, and she’d been ignoring my texts since she ran out like a bat from hell last week, but this was an emergency.
She picked up on the third ring.
“We need to move up our meeting,” I said without preamble. “We have a problem.”
“Are you joking? We lost our celebrity chef to rehab?”
“Do I look like I’m joking?” I watched Maya pace the length of our temporary office with tired resignation.
She was taking the news about as calmly as I’d expected, which was to say, not at all. She’d blown through the denial stage and jumped straight to anger.
“Okay.” She stopped pacing long enough to take a deep breath. “It’s fine. The optics will be bad, but we’ll just find a big enough replacement to overshadow the Derek news. You know, like, every chef in the world.”
There’s the bargaining stage.
“Knowing them isn’t the same as convincing them,” I said. “I already called the other names on my original shortlist. They all said no.”
“Then add other names.”
“They’ll be second tier in terms of recognition.”
Maya’s eye twitched. She was allergic to the term “second tier,” and I briefly worried I’d have to call an ambulance to deal with her inevitable meltdown.
I didn’t blame her. Our situation was less than ideal, to put it mildly.
It was bad enough we had to walk back Derek’s involvement so soon after the announcement. People would be buzzing about his DUIs for weeks, and his rehab stint would come up in any substantive coverage about the collaboration.
What was worse was the strain it put on our production timeline. We needed at least three months for product development, followed by another three to six months for mass production, testing, and packaging. That was assuming there were no delays and nothing went wrong.
Basically, we were already behind, and if we didn’t get a chef to start working on the recipes in the next forty-eight hours, we might as well hang up our aprons and call it a day.
“No,” Maya said. “I refuse to believe we can’t find a big-name chef when your family owns half the gourmet restaurants in existence.
I don’t care if you have to blackmail them or put a gun to their head.
Hell, I’ll put a gun to their head. This launch is going to happen, and it.
Is. Going. To. Be. Amazing. Do you understand? ”
In a clear-cut case of highly inappropriate timing, I discovered that unhinged Maya both frightened me and turned me on a little.
But it wasn’t enough to change the facts.
I unlocked my phone and tossed it at her. “Go ahead. Give it a try. Their names and contact info are in my Notes app.”
Long story short: even Maya’s scarily creative attempts at intimidation and bribery weren’t enough to persuade the world’s most famous chefs to abandon their day-to-day duties in favor of creating a frozen foods line, which they saw as beneath them.
“This is it.” She covered her face with her hands. We’d breezed past bargaining and were currently deep in depression. “This is the end of my career.”
“That’s a little dramatic.”
She spread her fingers to glare at me through the cracks. “You’re not being dramatic enough. This has your name tied to it too. Do you want to go down in history as a failure? Do you want your rivals to laugh at you behind your back?”
She was the only rival whose opinion I cared about, but I kept that to myself. “Look, we can ask one of the lesser-known names. They’re still great chefs, and at this point, we can’t be picky.”
“I guess not.” She sighed. “Do you think your old instructors from culinary school would do it? There are some big names there, and they’re not running restaurants. Maybe—” She stopped, her eyes widening.
Shit. That expression never boded well. “What?”
“Seb,” she breathed. “You can do it.”
Ice flooded my veins. “What the fuck are you talking about?”
“You!” Maya gestured at me, her voice pitching higher with excitement.
“You’re not a professional chef, but you might as well be.
You have formal training. You obviously know this launch inside and out.
And think of the PR angle. The famous Laurent heir rolling up his sleeves to tackle the recipes himself?
The media will eat it up. We can spin Derek’s withdrawal as a strategic shift.
You’re not the backup; you’re the innovation. The new way we’re doing things.”
Her reasoning made sense, but every alarm bell clanged in my head anyway. “You don’t understand what it takes to create these recipes from scratch. I’m not qualified enough.”
“But you’re not creating them from scratch. Derek gave you his blueprints already.”
My jaw tightened. I wished I could rewind time and go back to the moment Past Me agreed to this stupid project. Clearly, I hadn’t been in my right mind. “It doesn’t matter. I can’t do it.”
Maya’s eyes flashed. “Why the hell not?”
Because I’m terrified I’ll fuck up, and people will die.
Because I’m not ready.
Because it was hard enough for me to cook again for one other person, let alone thousands.
“Because our exec boards will never go for it,” I said instead.
“Our exec boards will have no choice but to go for it. There’s no other option,” Maya argued.
“There are plenty of other options. The lesser-known chefs—”
“I know why you don’t want to do this, Sebastian, and it has nothing to do with board approval.”
I stiffened, but I kept my expression neutral even as my stomach lurched with dread.
She didn’t know. She couldn’t.
Maya planted her hands on the table and leaned forward, her eyes piercing mine.
“You’re scared,” she said. “This isn’t something you can breeze through without effort.
For once in your life, you’ll have to actually try.
You don’t know how things will turn out, and that scares the shit out of you.
You’re so used to coasting that you’d rather stay in your comfort zone than face potential failure.
Well, guess what? That’s what other people do every single day.
They try their best and hope it’s enough.
If it’s not, they pick themselves up and try again because they don’t have the luxury of making excuses.
So if you’re too much of a coward to step up when it matters, that’s fine.
But I don’t work with cowards, Sebastian.
If you walk away without even trying, you’re not the man I thought you were, and that’ll be the end of this relationship. ”
She didn’t raise her voice, but her words slashed through me with the brutal efficiency of a knife.
Shame oozed out of the wounds until I sat there gutted and hollowed out, every ugly truth she’d thrown at me rattling around inside.
I could barely look at her because she was right.
I was scared, not only of how my actions would impact others but also of how they would impact me and my reputation.
I’d grown up with the certainty that if I wanted to succeed at something, I would.
School and sports came as easily to me as breathing, and I never understood what it was like to fall on my face.
Even when Maya bested me at something, I didn’t feel like I’d failed because she was the only person I admired enough to take a backseat to—at least temporarily.
She pushed me to be better, and our rivalry was a lesson, not a setback.
But what happened three years ago was my first taste of true failure. It was so bitter it left me spiraling, and I wondered if I didn’t have the stomach for this. If my skin was too thin, if my sensibilities were too brittle, and if my love for cooking was a liability rather than an asset.
It hurt more when you failed at something you actually cared about. It was easier to play small and count the little guaranteed victories than to swing big and miss.
But I also couldn’t stand the way Maya was looking at me like she didn’t know me. In some respects, she didn’t, but even when she hated me, she treated me like someone worthy of her energy—not a lowlife who bailed when things got hard.
I swallowed past the painful knot in my throat.
“What’ll it be?” she asked. “Are you taking one for the team, or are you asking someone else to pinch-hit for you?”
Her eyes bore into me as I glanced at my phone.
I had a dozen chefs whom I could call as backup. They were nowhere near Derek’s level of fame, and the substitution would spark a bunch of whispers in the industry, but they’d do a good job. Who knew? This collaboration could launch one of them to stardom.
Unlike me, they had guts and experience. They were the best bet, Maya’s recriminations be damned.
I pocketed my phone and met her gaze. The weight of my decision closed in on me, but my voice was steady when I replied.
“If I’m going to take Derek’s place, we’d better get started,” I said. “We have a lot of work to do.”