Chapter 16
JENNIFER
My third morning on the island starts with nausea, but, because life loves a joke, no billionaires have wandered back into the kitchen demanding coffee or pretending they know how to cut an onion, so the job has been easier today.
The prenatal vitamin goes down at five forty-three, which is four minutes earlier than yesterday, which is either progress or proof that passing out on the prep notes at nine thirty actually works.
I was in bed by ten and got a full seven hours for the first time since I left home.
Well, my old home. Before I got kicked out of it.
Either way, I'm at the counter with my one allowed coffee before the island has fully decided what kind of morning it's going to be, and that feels like something.
The kitchen is mine for at least an hour, before anyone else wakes up and wanders in.
The herb garden is calling me before prep starts.
I stand at the kitchen window debating it for a full minute, because outside is where they are, and bumping into any one of them before my first coffee is not something I'm equipped to handle.
Then I remember the geography.
I've mapped this island the way you do when you're actively trying to avoid three people while living under the same roof as them. The herb garden is the far corner, tucked behind the kitchen wing, as far from the main house as the property allows.
Safe. Mine.
I go.
The garden is amazing, there’s rosemary in a long row, woody and established.
Thyme in three varieties which I identify by crushing a leaf between my fingers and holding it to my nose, a habit my mother had that I absorbed without noticing until I was doing it alone in foreign gardens at six in the morning.
Flat-leaf parsley, chives, two kinds of mint, tarragon, which I haven't cooked with enough and intend to fix.
At the far end, half in shadow, a bay tree that has been here longer than everything else, its lower branches nearly at my shoulder, the leaves dark and waxy and smelling exactly the way bay is supposed to smell when it's real rather than the dried version that's been sitting in a jar for two years doing nothing for anyone.
I stand next to the bay tree for a moment.
The island is beautiful at this time of day.
The light starts to come gold through the trees, the water beyond the garden wall going from flat gray, and it's warm already, and the whole place smells of salt and green things and the particular sweetness of something flowering further up the hill that I haven't identified yet.
I breathe it in and feel my shoulders drop approximately two inches.
See, my omega says. Nobody's here.
I know, I tell her. Don't make a thing of it.
The lunch service is fine.
The guests eat what's put in front of them and don't leave anything on the plates, which is the only feedback that counts in a service kitchen; the rest is just people with opinions about food, which describes everyone and is therefore not specific information.
I get a notepad from the drawer next to the refrigerator, the same one I used for last night’s prep notes, and start writing. Menu planning. Practical things. Tether myself to something concrete.
Three courses for dinner. The Italian couple want good olive oil and will notice if it isn't, which is fine because the olive oil in this pantry is genuinely excellent and I've been using it with the reverent care it deserves.
The British guests are fine. The two new guests arriving tomorrow for the Nakamura meetings — Carmen said formal, Japanese, so the dinner the night they arrive wants to be confident without being showy, the kind of food that says someone was paying attention.
The handwriting on the previous pages is mine, careful and small, Anna's rice recipe in the margins with her annotations copied faithfully. Don't skip the resting time.
The dinner goes well. The lamb goes out medium and rested, the herbs from the garden in the crust, the tarragon in the sauce making exactly the argument I hoped it would.
The vegetables are honest, roasted with the good olive oil, nothing clever happening to them, just heat and time and something that belonged in the ground recently.
The dessert is a tart I have made approximately forty times in various kitchens under various conditions and it comes out right every single time, not because it's simple but because I've earned the repetitions.
I stand at the counter after the last plate goes out and breathe.
"We did that," I tell the kitchen, and feel briefly ridiculous, and then decide that talking to a kitchen at eight thirty after a good service is a completely defensible habit and I'm keeping it.
The baby shifts, approvingly.
"You helped," I allow.
Carmen appears in the doorway while I'm wiping down the marble, clipboard in hand, bergamot and clove and the particular energy of a woman who has seventeen things to do and is choosing to pause on purpose.
"The guests are happy," she says.
I look up. “Really?”
"The Italian couple asked who made the lamb." She checks her clipboard. "Mrs. Bellini said, and I'm quoting directly, that the tarragon sauce was the best thing she'd eaten since her grandmother died."
I put the cloth down. "That's either a compliment or a tragedy."
"In Italian cooking," Carmen says, "it's the highest possible praise." She makes a note on her clipboard. "You're doing a good job, Jennifer."
"Thanks," I say, because sometimes the simple answer is the right one and also because something about Carmen saying it so plainly, no fuss, no performance, just the plain fact of it, lands somewhere I wasn't prepared for.
She nods once and disappears back down the corridor, already onto the next thing, because Carmen is always already onto the next thing.
I finish the marble. Heavy pot, lower shelf, left side. Good knives back on the strip, widest to narrowest. Herb garden trimmings in the compost bin. Full pass, end to end.
Then I make tea from whatever is in the cloth bags in the pantry, which turns out to be a local herb blend that takes three sips to win me over but does eventually win me over, and I take it to the window.
The sunset is doing the most.
Genuinely. Orange going deep pink going something I don't have a name for, the water below the garden wall catching all of it and throwing it back in pieces.
My old apartment had a window that faced the side wall of the building next door.
Eight inches of sky if you stood at the right angle.
In winter, one hour of direct light in the afternoon if you were lucky.
I used to plan my coffee break around it.
Eight inches.
I stand here with my tea and look at the whole sky going absolutely feral with color and I think about the baby the way I do sometimes now, not the three-in-the-morning version that requires talking down, not the logistics version, not the panic version.
The other one. The one where she's just real.
Mine and real, and the future is somewhere I'm walking toward instead of something sitting on my chest.
She shifts.
"I know," I say. "It's a lot."
The breeze comes off the garden, warm and salt-sweet, and then underneath it, just for a second, something else. Dark and clean, like good wood with heat underneath. My nose finds it and holds it before it moves on, gone before I can decide what to do about it.
I know that scent.
Again!
Matteo.
I stand exactly where I am, both hands around the mug, and I wait until my nose confirms it's gone. Which it does. Eventually.
My omega sulks briefly.
I rinse the mug, put it back where it belongs, turn off the kitchen light, and walk back up the shell path to my room. The water is just audible below the hill. The stars are doing their excessive island thing overhead, more than feels reasonable, like the sky has been saving them up.
I get into bed, pull the covers up, and stare at the ceiling fan.
At least the billionaires kept their distance tonight, I think. I should feel good about that. I do feel good about that.
My omega snorts.
"You're a terrible liar," she says.
"Good night," I tell her.
There’s a knock at my door, and I think maybe Matteo has decided to stop being a stalker and just come to the door.
Oh, it’s not Matteo, but even better, it’s Elara.
She’s in the corridor with her natural hair down and a cardigan that has seen better days and an expression of someone who fully expects to be told no and is asking anyway.
"Card game," she says. "If you're still up for it. No pressure if you're too tired."
I am, but I could do with company too.
"Give me five minutes," I say.
She beams.
The staff common room is at the far end of the building, a low-ceilinged room with mismatched chairs and a table that has clearly been used for exactly this purpose many times before, its surface ringed with the evidence of previous Friday nights.
A ceiling fan turns overhead. Someone has brought a portable speaker that is playing something with a good bass line at a reasonable volume.
There are six of them when I walk in.
Miguel is already at the table, shuffling with the practiced ease of a man who takes cards seriously.
Beside him is a woman named Priya, beta, early thirties, who runs the guest laundry and has the composed manner of someone who has seen the inside of enough strangers' suitcases to be permanently unshockable.
Across from her is a young alpha named Dario, barely twenty, broad-shouldered and still growing into himself, who works the dock with Miguel and goes slightly pink when introduced to me, which I find extremely endearing.
Next to him is Bea, an older beta woman with silver-streaked locs who manages the housekeeping rotation and who looks at me with the assessing calm of someone deciding whether I am going to be a problem or an asset.
The last person at the table is a man I haven't seen before, late forties, lean and weathered, who introduces himself as Pepe and says he manages the grounds with Miguel and has been on this island for eleven years, which he says the way people say things they are proud of without wanting to appear proud of them.
"Jennifer," Elara says, pulling out the chair beside her. "She's our new chef."
"We know," Bea says, with the particular tone of someone who has already formed an opinion. "The Italian couple asked about the lamb. That hasn't happened since the season before last."
I sit down.
"What are we playing?" I ask.
"Rummy," Miguel says, already dealing. "Elara cheats at poker."
"I don't cheat," Elara says. "I play intuitively."
"She cheats," Dario confirms, in the solemn tone of someone who has lost money to this.
I pick up my cards.
For the next two hours I don’t think about Santos or Matteo or Tomas or Vegas or any of it.
I think about my hand and whether Bea is bluffing and whether Pepe's tell is the thing he does with his left shoulder when he has a good card, which it is, and I drink the cold beer that appears at my elbow courtesy of Elara who has clearly decided we are already friends, and I laugh at something Dario says about the supply boat captain that is apparently an ongoing island joke with considerable history behind it.
Bea wins two of the four rounds, which she accepts with the composure of someone who expected this outcome.
I come second in the last round, which earns me a nod from Miguel that I understand to be high praise.
"Same time next week?" Elara says, when the cards are put away and people are finding their feet.
“For sure,” I say.
I walk back to my room through the warm dark with my strawberry scent soft in the night air and something loosened in my chest that I did not realize was held.
Not everything about this island is complicated.
If anything, talking and thinking about other things made a nice welcome change.