Chapter 20
We walk for fifteen minutes up the cobbled streets, early evening twilight blooming across the town up ahead, past little
shops selling patisserie, textiles, and cooking equipment all closed up for the night.
“Are you hungry?” he says, our feet clicking against the gravelled pathway.
“Famished.” I nod.
Eventually, once the panic has melted into something more malleable, I realize this is the town I was meant to run to the
other day when we make it to the main square. A huge ageing fountain marked with festoon lights and the swelling sound of
classical music coming from the nearby restaurants.
We wander past a few until we reach a quiet little bistro with enough tables and chairs to fit maybe thirty people.
Some of the tables are filled, a group of friends laughing over a carafe of wine, a family eating quietly as one child plays on an iPad and the other smears ketchup on the tablecloth, a couple deep in conversation, their faces flickering in the candlelight.
Oliver hops ahead to open the door for me.
Once we’re sitting, I examine his face for an answer before finally asking the question as we’re led to a table by a smiling
older man with a gray beard. “Why are you being so nice to me?”
“That feels like a loaded question.” Oliver shifts to get comfortable in the wooden chair before leaning his forearms on the
table. His face softens as it’s cast in candlelight.
I rephrase. “Why, after everything I’ve done? Kissing you, rejecting you, nearly kissing you again, rejecting you again—”
He holds a hand out with a sheepish smile. “All right, you’re just rubbing salt in the wound now,” he says, looking down at
the table.
“Sorry. And I’m sorry for being a bitch to you.”
“You haven’t been. You’ve been . . .” He pauses to think. “A puzzle to solve. An enigma on legs.”
“An enigma?” I shrug as the waiter appears. “Suppose I’ve been called worse.”
He leans over and speaks to the waiter in French.
I smile at him, and he rolls his eyes before waving his hands around lazily. “Fromage, coq l’orange, vin rouge. I can go on.”
Letting out a cathartic laugh, I join in. “Macaron, pain au chocolat . . .”
“Wow, you too? See, we have so much in common.” His eyes glow a bright amber in the candlelight before he sits back and sighs.
“I guess I just see something in your eyes that reminds me of myself. When I was going through a bad time.” His mouth twists
as he contemplates his next words. “Now I think I know who caused the bad time?” It’s phrased more as a question than an assumption.
I wring my fingers under the table. “If I looked like I was having a bad time, it was probably the shrimp canapés?” I let
out an emotionless laugh, hoping to lighten the mood, to avoid telling him the truth I so desperately want him to hear.
“You looked like you were grieving.”
My eyes snag on his as I glance up, holding my breath. A bullet of truth hitting me in the chest. Nobody else has ever phrased
it that way, but I guess I was grieving. It feels selfish to call it that, knowing other people have been through much worse
than me. But I am grieving. Grieving the old me. The fun, carefree version of myself before my life went to shit. Before the
pressure to reclaim a life someone else took from me overrode the need to enjoy it.
The waiter reappears with a matching carafe of red wine to the group of friends across the room.
I clear my throat. “What makes you think that?”
He looks down at the table, his fingernail scraping at the wood grain as he considers what to say next. “My dad died last
year, dropped dead at his desk from a heart attack. I saw the same thing in you that I’ve been feeling for what feels like
forever.”
For a second I’m taken aback, endeared by the thought that he’d be willing to be this vulnerable with me, to crack open the
vault for someone he barely knows to peek in. I lean forward, placing my hand over his. “I’m so sorry. Were you two close?”
“Kind of, in the way that you see an adult version of them and they see a kid version of you.” He hesitates for a second.
“He wanted me to be an investment banker or something in finance; we had a lot of disagreements about that.”
“He wanted you to be the next Dominic Odericco?” I tease, pulling a small smile from his somber face.
He nods. “But I wanted to be a chef. I always enjoyed and wanted to pursue cooking but got pretty good grades at school, so my dad heavily encouraged me to get a business degree. A lot of people in my family are in the field, so he thought it would be the best
thing for me. Longevity, a career with a path already laid out, I would know how much I was making in five, ten, fifteen years.”
I tilt my head, studying his face. “So no offense but . . . why are you an assistant?”
He laughs, pouring the wine for me and then himself. His gaze flicks up from his glass in a way that makes my blood fizz.
“Do you want the short story or the real one?”
“Hang on.” Holding a finger up, I take a sip of the wine, swilling it in my mouth for a second before swallowing. “Okay, real.”
He looks me up and down. “Were you waiting to see if I ordered shitty wine?” He mimes stabbing himself in the heart. As our
glasses hit the table, the waiter appears again with two giant plates of food.
“I was seeing if I needed to order something stronger if we’re about to get into the weeds. Real story please.” I offer up
my glass to clink with his, relieved to not have Malcolm at the forefront of my mind for the first time today.
He lifts his glass to mine, not taking his molten eyes off me as the ping of the glasses echoes off the stone walls.
“My dad was a claims manager for this big insurance firm in the U.S. for, like, forty years. Before the funeral, I went to his office to collect his things from his desk.” He sighs before continuing.
“But they’d already cleared everything, and someone else had put their things up.
Family pictures, trinkets, their favorite mug.
My dad’s stuff was dumped in a box left in a storage cupboard with an ‘our condolences’ card on top of it, gathering dust, next to the spare pens and printer paper.
He gave that firm forty years of his life, and they’d replaced him in a week.
The entire time I’d been alive, he’d gone to that same office every morning.
His whole career, everything he’d worked for, his entire life summed up in a fucking cardboard box and a life insurance check. ”
He takes a breath and runs a hand through his dark hair. “So when my mom insisted I take half the money, I used it to buy
a plane ticket and enroll in a culinary school in London. I needed a fresh start, and what better way than to pursue something
I’d always wanted to do. Every meal you make touches a different person; you can tell a story through food. When I die, I
don’t want my legacy to be a box and a check.”
My brow furrows. “So why are you at TechRumble instead of some Michelin-starred restaurant?”
I watch his throat bob as he takes a large swig of the wine. “For the first couple of weeks of the course, I had this almost
manic level of motivation. I was excited by the idea of becoming this incredible chef and meeting people whose dreams aligned
with mine. But once the initial adrenaline wore off, I spiraled. I hadn’t processed anything that had happened with my dad.
My work got sloppy, sometimes I wasn’t able to get out of bed for days, and I began missing classes, getting behind. At the
end of the first year, they told me not to come back for the second. I was devastated, confused, and angry, but I didn’t want
to go back home. That felt like the ultimate failure. So I reached out to Dominic and asked if I could crash at his place
for a few weeks while I figured things out.”
He shifts, scratching the back of his neck. “Then once the student visa department got wind that I had been kicked out of school, I needed a job to stay in the country. That’s when Dom offered me a full-time assistant role.”
“You never really chose to be where you are now? It just happened to you.”
“I guess, but it was more trying to make the best of a bad situation—turns out you can’t outrun depression.” His face briefly
cringes. “I’m good now. Well, settled.”
My mouth twists into a sympathetic, closed-mouth smile. “If cooking is what you love and you have the money saved up, why
don’t you do that now?”
“Scared, I guess. Of failing again. Even if I don’t enjoy this job, at least it’s safe.”
“If I had that money, I would go for it.” I take a breath, saying it to myself as well as him, “If you fail, you fail.”
His jaw tenses. “If I fail, I’m going to end up right back here and be just like my dad.”
My hand lays across his, fingers squeezing. “I’m sure your dad’s legacy is more than what you imagine; his work probably affected
more people than you know.”
Oliver tries to avoid rolling his eyes as I continue. “A claims manager makes sure people get their money, right? What if someone’s house burns down? Your dad making sure they got the money meant they could rebuild
their lives.”
His gaze softens, a dimple appearing on one side of his mouth. “Is that what you’re doing? Rebuilding after the house burns
down?”
I remove my hand from his and run my finger up the stem of the glass. “That’s one way to put it.”
He doesn’t ask a follow-up question, just leaves the space open for me to share if I want to. I consider Cecily’s words of encouragement, Dr. Bernie’s advice onstage, and whether I’m already in too deep with my feelings for Oliver.
Maybe I should pull back and continue to hide this part of myself from him. But if I wanted to do that, why am I here? I’ve
been saying I don’t want to know him, that I don’t want him to know me. But I want to tell him what happened to me.
“He, my ex, took photos of me. When we were being . . . intimate.” I clear the words from my throat. “And he sent it to a
group chat with his work friends. My colleagues.”