31. Saint
THIRTY-ONE
SAINT
I know I’ve fucked up when the bread won’t rise. The dough sits there like a lump of regret, refusing to stretch or climb. I poke it, and it sighs back at me with disappointment.
This isn’t my job. Prepping and baking are usually reserved for our boulanger and station chefs, but I can’t sleep.
I should be organizing and delegating for the Thursday dinner rush, but instead, I’m chained to someone else’s workstation, staring at a failed starter with the haunted zeal of a man seeing his own future in a glass bowl.
“You brooding or proofing?” Rome asks, coming around the prep table with a crate of apples balanced on his shoulder, cowboy hat in place, and worn jeans and boots dragging dirt across the floor.
I glare at him. “Do you see any movement?”
Rome sets the crates down, cracks his neck, and squints at the dough. “You used the right yeast?”
Rome likes to think, since he helps out by providing local produce on his farm, that he’s an honorary sous chef .
“Of course I used the right fucking yeast.” I press my palms into the counter, willing the dough to rise by intimidation alone.
Rome grins. “Chill, Chef. It’s just bread.”
“It’s not just bread,” I snap, but then I see the glint in his eye. He’s baiting me on purpose, trying to get a rise out of me since the dough can’t manage it.
He waits for the next blowup, but when it doesn’t come, he frowns. “Where’s the hurricane?”
“What?”
“The hurricane. You know, the thing where you go berserk over a garnish being one-sixteenth of an inch too wide and then the whole staff cowers for the rest of the night.”
“It’s five in the morning,” I say, aware of how tired I sound.
“You look like shit.”
“Thanks.”
“All right, well, the good news is I have all morning to pick apart your mood.”
Rome bites into an apple with vigor, juice splattering the stainless. I glare at him. The prep cook, a string bean named Lyle, keeps shooting nervous glances between us like he expects a knife fight.
I want to tell him he’s not wrong.
Rome finishes his apple, tossing the core in the trash. “You know what I heard? That video of yours hit ten million views before she deleted it.”
I go still. “Wrenley deleted it?”
“Yesterday afternoon. Poof. Gone. Like it never existed.”
There’s a small, tectonic movement inside my chest. I haven’t looked at the video since finding it. Watching the comments multiply within five minutes was enough.
“I didn’t know,” I answer Rome .
“Interesting.” Rome leans against the counter, crossing his arms. “So you’re telling me she took down a viral video with millions of views that was probably worth serious money in sponsorships ... and you didn’t even notice?”
I scrape the failed dough into the trash. “I’ve been busy.”
“Too busy to notice the woman who’s got you baking bread at dawn like some Victorian widower?”
“Fuck off, Rome.”
“That’s more like it.” He grins, unperturbed. “Brother, if you don’t fix this, I will.”
“What the fuck are you on about now?”
“That girl deserves someone who knows her worth.”
I turn to him. Slowly. “You wouldn’t.”
“Try me. I have a thing for complicated women who’ve been hurt by stupid men.”
I’m around the prep table before I can think, getting in his face. Rome doesn’t back down. He never does.
“She’s not some conquest for you to add to your collection,” I growl.
“No,” Rome says, voice dropping to match mine. “But she’s also not some girl you get to know and then abandon when things get complicated, either.”
“You don’t know shit about what went on between us.”
“Don’t I?” He shifts, and I catch the scent of hay and leather that follows him everywhere.
“I know you’ve been in here every morning this week, destroying perfectly good ingredients because you can’t sleep.
I know you’ve been snapping at your staff like they personally killed your dog.
And I know that woman deleted a video worth more money than most people make in a year to protect you. ”
“She made her choice,” I say, but it sounds hollow even to me .
“Bullshit.” Rome steps closer, hat shadowing his eyes. “She made a sacrifice. There’s a difference.”
Lyle clears his throat from across the kitchen. “Should I ... should I come back later?”
“No,” I bark, not taking my eyes off Rome.
“Stay,” Rome says, giving Lyle a reassuring nod. “I’m done here, anyway.”
Rome grabs another apple, polishes it on his shirt, and tosses it to me. I catch it reflexively.
“You know what your problem is?” He adjusts his hat, stepping back. “You think you’re doing her a favor. But what you’re really doing is only protecting yourself.”
“And what do you know about it? You’ve met her once .”
Rome shrugs. “It was enough to like her. And I was there all day with you two. I can’t unsee what I saw, and that was two people who were happy together.
” He hooks his thumbs in the pockets of his jeans, voice softening.
“Look, I get it. You built walls for a reason. But those walls aren’t just keeping people out anymore. They’re keeping you trapped.”
I respond with a dismissive grunt. “You don’t have a child. You don’t know what it’s like.”
“Maybe not.” He straightens, gathering his invoices. “But I know what loneliness looks like. And it’s staring back at me right now.”
Rome turns to leave, pausing at the kitchen door. “For what it’s worth, she didn’t just delete that video for you. You know she did it for Ivy, too.”
He walks out, boots scuffing against the tile, leaving me with an apple in my hand and a sour taste in my mouth.
I spend the rest of the morning in a fog, delegating tasks with minimal words and maximum intensity. The staff scatters when I approach, a choreography of avoidance I’ve perfected over the years. Usually, it satisfies me. Today, it just annoys me.
By six o’clock, the dining room is at capacity. Every table is full, and the waitlist is thirty names deep. The servers weave through the dining room with trained professionalism, but their faces are tight with strain.
I turn my attention to the plate in front of me, wiping a smudge of sauce from the rim with a towel. Something feels off tonight. The energy is wrong. Too many cell phones out, too many heads turning toward the kitchen instead of focusing on their food.
“Table twelve wants to know if you’ll come out and talk to them,” Mags says, sliding a ticket to the expediter. “They specifically asked for the chef.”
I stop the expediter with a hand up before he can read out the order.
“I’m busy,” I reply, not looking up from the plate. “Tell them I’m in the middle of service.”
“They said they’re food vloggers from New York. They want to discuss a feature.”
I set down my spoon. “I don’t do features.”
Mags hesitates. “They’re being persistent.”
“Then tell them I am persistently unavailable.”
She nods and retreats. I return to plating, but my concentration is fucked. Food vloggers. From New York. And I thought it was bad when it was just random fans wanting to see a dish “made by the hands.”
The kitchen suddenly feels too hot, too crowded. I scan the dining room again, noticing how many phones are pointed in my direction, how many eyes flick toward the pass when they think I’m not looking.
“Table nine wants to know if you’ll come out and take a picture with them,” Eddie pipes up from the pass. “And table twelve is asking if we have merchandise.”
I stare at him. “Merchandise?”
“T-shirts. Mugs.” Eddie shifts uncomfortably. “Something about ‘Chef Daddy.’“
“Chef what?” The words leave my mouth so slowly they might as well be crawling across the floor.
Eddie’s ears turn the color of the beet puree we serve with the duck. “Chef ... Daddy. That’s what they’re calling you online. And you’ve gained two hundred thousand followers.”
I stare at him so long that he actually takes a step back, bumping into Lyle, who drops a stack of plates. The crash echoes through the kitchen like a gunshot.
Eddie holds up his hands in surrender. “Their words, not mine. Though I did see someone wearing a T-shirt with ‘The Hands’ written across it when I came in.”
My responding laughter makes him freeze. It’s such an unexpected sound that three other line cooks flinch.
Eddie hesitates. “So that’s a no on the merch?”
“That’s a fuck no. And we have a dress code. If anyone doesn’t follow it, they’re out on their ass.”
“Got it, Chef.” He scurries back to the dining room, leaving me to stare blindly. The expo shouts out orders that are piling up. These are dishes I could prepare in my sleep, but right now, it feels like he’s shouting in a foreign language.
One of our new servers approaches with her phone out. “Chef, do you mind if I?—”
“Put that away before I toss it in the fryer.”
She blanches and backs away.
I return to plating, but my hands aren’t steady anymore. The quenelle of crème fra?che slides off-center. The microgreens scatter unevenly. Everything is just slightly wrong, like a painting tilted two degrees .
“Refire on table seven,” Mags calls out. “They said the duck is too pink.”
I look at the returned plate. The duck is perfect. Pink in the center, crispy skin, sauce pooled exactly where it should be. But they’re not actually complaining about the food.
They want to see me.
“Table seven can go fuck themselves,” I mutter, but I start preparing a new duck anyway. Because that’s what you do. You cook. You serve. You don’t let the circus distract from the craft.
Unfortunately, the circus has already set up camp in my dining room.
“Chef.” Eddie appears at my elbow again. “There’s a woman at table fifteen who says she knows you. Says her name is Brenda Chu?”
My knife stills against the cutting board.
Brenda. Wrenley’s agent. The woman who picked my lock and sized me up like livestock at a cattle auction.
“What does she want?”
“She ordered the tasting menu and asked me to tell you she’s here on business. Not pleasure.” Eddie pauses. “She also said to tell you she doesn’t bite unless provoked.”