19. Asher
ASHER
We’re going on two fucking weeks of this space thing and I’m about at my limit.
Four days. Four days of watching our girl, our fucking girl, having lunch with Raphael at the outdoor tables by the tasting room.
Same time. Same corner. Same easy conversation that I can’t hear from the prep station but can see well enough because the window is right there and I’m not avoiding it, I’m just at the station, I’m always at the station.
I agreed to the space.
I want to be clear about that. I sat with the guys at Vine two weeks ago and I nodded and said yes, give her room, don’t crowd the process, and I meant it.
It was the right call. I still think it was the right call in the same way I think a lot of things are right in theory while being genuinely brutal in practice.
The practice is: Harper laughs differently with Raphael than she’s been laughing with us lately.
Which is on us. I know that. Doesn’t make it easier to watch.
I put my coat on and go to the kitchen to do something about it the only way I know how.
When something is sitting in my chest that I can’t name cleanly, I make something that requires my full attention. Not comfort food. Not muscle memory. Something technical enough that my brain has to be completely present or the whole thing falls apart.
Today that’s the mille-feuille I’ve been developing for the midsummer dessert course.
A laminated pastry with a champagne cream and the estate’s late summer strawberries, and the lamination has been giving me trouble because mille-feuille doesn’t forgive sloppiness at any stage.
Cold butter, cold hands, cold kitchen, full attention at every fold.
You either mean it or you end up with a very expensive stack of compressed dough and wasted morning.
I start the dough. I work the butter block. I focus on the temperature of my hands against the pastry, keeping it moving, keeping it even.
It helps. For about twenty minutes it actually helps and my brain is only in the kitchen and not in the outdoor seating area where Harper is probably already at the corner table waiting for Raphael with her coffee and her tablet and that face she makes when she’s running through a problem.
I press the butter into the first fold.
I know what this looks like from the outside.
I know Raphael isn’t doing anything wrong.
He’s Lorenzo’s brother, he’s been around the estate all summer, he’s a good man who asked nothing of her and ended up in the gap we left open.
That’s not his fault. I’ve told myself this several times today and it keeps being true and it keeps not being the point.
The point is that she needs someone to talk to and it isn’t one of us.
The point is that I sent room service to her suite three times this week with a blank card because I have no idea what to put on it that isn’t either too much or not enough. A blank card from this kitchen means something. I don’t know if she knows that.
Second fold. I put the dough back to rest. My phone buzzes on the shelf above the station.
Maddox: Have you seen her today?
I look at the message. I look at my hands. I dry them on my apron and pick up the phone.
Asher: No. You?
Maddox: No. kill?
Three minutes pass. Killian’s thinking or he’s in a meeting or he’s doing the same thing I’m doing, which is standing somewhere in this building trying to act like it’s a normal day.
Killian: She has a briefing with Mallory at two.
Maddox: And before two?
Killian doesn’t answer that one.
Asher: Raphael probably knows.
I put my phone back on the shelf.
The three of us checked in on her through each other instead of going to her directly, which tells you everything about where we are right now.
Two weeks ago I would have walked into any room she was in without thinking twice about it.
Now I’m standing in my kitchen texting the other two men who slept with her to find out if any of us have seen her today.
We did this. The space was our idea.
I go back to the pastry.
Third lamination pass. I’m getting it right this time, I can feel the layers holding, the butter distributing evenly through the dough the way it’s supposed to.
Twenty-seven layers when it’s done. That’s what you’re building toward with mille-feuille.
Twenty-seven layers of pastry that shatter cleanly when a fork goes through them and then give all at once into something soft.
You can’t rush the process. You can’t skip a fold to get there faster.
You just have to keep working it and trust that the result is worth what the making costs you.
I’m aware of the metaphor.
I’m choosing to just make the pastry.
The lunch service runs the way lunch service always runs, which is to say fast and loud and requiring my full attention in all the ways the pastry required it earlier.
I run the pass, I call corrections, I push the service through and it’s good, it’s a good lunch service, and I’m present for all of it.
I’m also aware, through the service window that looks out over the corridor toward the main building, that the outdoor tables are in the sightline from the far end of the pass.
They’re there. Same corner. Same coffee.
Raphael’s got his elbows on the table and he’s saying something and Harper is listening with her chin in her hand and the expression she gets when something is genuinely interesting to her, and then she laughs and it’s the full one, the real version, head tipping back, completely unguarded, the one I’ve been watching her aim at everyone except us for two weeks.
I call a correction on the sauce at station three without looking away from the pass.
The line cook adjusts. The service keeps moving.
I know what it is. What I’m feeling. I’ve been dancing around the name of it for two weeks because naming it means sitting with it and sitting with it means doing something about it and we agreed not to do something about it yet.
I’ve felt it before. A long time ago, before Monica, before all of it, when I still thought love was something patient that waited for you to be ready.
It doesn’t wait.
It never did.
“Asher.” My sous chef at my elbow, needing the count for the turn.
I give it to her immediately, clean, no hesitation.
I’ve been doing this for thirty years. Running a kitchen doesn’t stop for anything, not for heartbreak, not for Monica, not for whatever is sitting in my chest right now watching Harper Brooks laugh at someone else’s joke.
Service ends.
I go back to the pastry.
I fold it one more time and put it to rest and I already know it’s going to come out right.
Some things just do, if you’re patient enough to let them.