26. Vivienne
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Vivienne
The rain is slowly picking up steam. We stand under the overhang outside Scuppers for a second while Callum turns his collar up and I pull my jacket on, fumbling with the zipper. Then we just start walking because the alternative is standing still, and neither of us seems to want that.
The street is mostly empty this late, the rain keeping people inside where it’s warm and dry. The storm has finally broken whatever warmth was holding, and the air smells like salt and electricity.
We walk close because of the narrow overhang, shoulders touching.
The rain is coming down hard now, but we keep walking at the same pace in the same direction.
Somewhere in the middle of the next block, Callum’s hand finds mine.
His fingers close around mine and mine close back, and neither of us looks down or says anything about it. We just keep walking in silence.
The rain starts to come down harder, and we speed up without discussing it, our footsteps splashing through puddles forming on the sidewalk.
We turn off the main street, and the restaurant appears at the end of the block. The windows are dark, the sign unlit. The churning water is visible behind it, angry and alive. His apartment sits above it. The whole building is quiet after the enormous night it just had.
We stop at the side door. He lets go of my hand to find his keys, patting his jacket pocket twice before finding them, and I stand beside him in the rain while he gets the lock.
The door opens onto a narrow stairwell. It’s dark until he reaches past me and finds a switch.
The light buzzes on, low and yellow and casting long shadows on the walls.
The stairs creak on the second step and the fourth, and I follow him up, one hand on the wall for balance, rain still in my hair, dripping down my neck.
His door is already unlocked, so he pushes it open and goes in ahead of me, moving through the dark with the ease of someone who has done it ten thousand times. By the time I cross the threshold, he’s already turned on the lamp in the corner, and the room lights up amber around us.
I stand in the doorway and just take in his space.
Books are stacked on the windowsill with no system, spines facing every direction, cookbooks mixed with nonfiction mixed with what looks like romance novels.
There’s fishing gear in the corner, a rod leaning against the wall beside a well-used tackle box.
A large rug that’s been here long enough to go soft in the middle, faded where feet have worn it down.
The kitchen is barely a kitchen. Especially for a chef.
There’s a two-burner stove, a short run of counter, and a cast-iron pan hanging above it.
A coffee maker and a shelf with a few things on it placed like an afterthought.
It’s small and sparse, but completely him.
I slowly take in the photos on the wall.
I walk to each one individually, trailing my fingers along the frames.
His brothers younger at a beach bonfire, all of them sunburned and grinning.
Patrick with a fish that has to be four feet long, looking like a kid on Christmas morning.
And the restaurant. It looks like it was taken on opening night.
The dining room is full behind them, candles lit on every table, and everyone is dressed up.
Callum and Wesley and Beckett and Hayes with their arms around each other, Patrick to the left with his hand on Callum’s shoulder, all of them laughing at something just outside the frame.
I look at it for a moment longer than I mean to and then turn away.
Callum’s in the kitchen filling two glasses of water, his back to me, jacket already off and draped over the single chair at a small table in the corner. I take my jacket off, find a hook by the door, and hang it there. When I turn around, he’s holding a glass out to me.
I take it while kicking off my wet boots before sitting on the couch and pulling my legs up.
When he comes over with his own glass, he sits at the other end without any discussion and doesn’t make anything of it when I tuck my cold feet under the edge of his thigh.
His hand settles against my ankle without hesitation.
The rain moves against the windows in waves.
I look around the room again, slower this time. The photos, the books, the fishing gear. The cast-iron pan. All of it his.
“You have a lot of pictures,” I say. I’m smiling and I don’t bother hiding it.
He glances at the wall, following my gaze.
“My dad prints them out and sends them to us. He says he doesn’t trust phones to keep things safe.
” The corner of his mouth moves. “Every few months, a new one shows up in an envelope. He says they are his favorite moments and he wants to make sure we have them too.”
I look at Patrick with the fish. At the bonfire. At opening night.
“That’s really lovely,” I murmur.
“Don’t tell him that. He’ll start sending more.”
I look at the opening night photo again.
“How long did it take?” I ask. “To open.”
He follows my eyes to the photo. “Four years from the first time I said it out loud to the night we unlocked the door.” He turns the water glass in his hands, watching the liquid move.
“Two years of planning and two years of building.” He takes a drink of his water.
“Sarah handled the books. And I handled everything else.”
He says her name without flinching.
“She was good at it,” he muses. “The financial side. I trusted her completely with that.” He’s still looking at the photo, his thumb tracing the rim of his glass.
“That was the thing I kept coming back to afterwards, you know? Not that she left. Or even that she was cheating on me. Just — I trusted her completely at least with the financial side. And I was wrong even with that.”
“I’m so sorry, Cal.”
He shakes his head slowly. “I’m not telling you because it still hurts the same way.
It doesn’t.” His face is earnest. “I’m telling you because I want you to understand what it cost me.
To trust someone like that and be that wrong about them.
” He sets his glass down on the coffee table.
“Sarah left and then the money was gone and the restaurant was drowning and I thought, Okay. That’s obviously what trust gets you.
You were already gone and I just —” He stops and looks at his own hands, turning them over like he’s searching for something.
“It made it hard to believe in much for a while. Including myself.”
The rain comes down hard for a moment against the glass.
“And then you walked into my restaurant,” he whispers.
“And I thought —” He pauses, looking at the distance between us on the couch, my feet tucked under his thigh, his hand resting on my ankle.
“I thought, Of course. Of course it’s you.
Of course the one person I’d spent five years being angry at is the one they send to save me.
” Emotion moves across his face. “I was so ready to be right about you. I’d built this whole story about who you’d become, about why you left and what it meant. It was easier than not knowing.”
“What was the story?” I ask quietly.
He leans back against the couch and looks at the ceiling.
“That you decided you were too good for it. For cooking and for the industry. Too good for” — he brings his eyes back down to me — “for me, maybe. I thought maybe you looked back at Paris and at everything we were and everything we had and decided it wasn’t worth carrying with you through everything you were accomplishing. ”
The words land with a dull thud against my heart.
“That’s not at all true.” My voice comes out more forceful than I mean it to. “That’s not even close to true.”
“I know.” He looks at me steadily. “I know that now. I think I started knowing it pretty early, actually. I just didn’t want to give up the anger because the anger was easier than” — he exhales through his nose and runs a hand through his damp hair — “the other thing.”
“What’s the other thing?”
His hand finds my ankle again. “Missing you,” he breathes. “Five years of just missing you every single day.”
My chest is doing somersaults, and I’m waiting for it to settle. “I missed you too. So much,” I murmur.
He gives me a lazy smile, his thumb moving in slow circles against my ankle without him seeming to notice. The same slow circles he does against my bare skin anytime he can reach it.
“Tell me about the restaurant name,” I insist, needing to shift the conversation somewhere I can handle.
He looks at me, a question in his eyes.
“I’ve been meaning to ask.” I set my water glass on the side table. It has a ring stain that looks like it’s been there since the furniture was built. “I looked up the meaning during the first week here. But I want to hear why you chose it. In your words.”
He’s watching the rain against the window in a drawn-out silence before he talks.
“Neap tides are moderate tides,” he explains. “They have the smallest range between high and low water. Everything is controlled and predictable. Manageable, almost.”
“Spring tides are the opposite. They have the highest highs and the lowest lows. The moon and sun are in alignment, pulling everything as far as it’ll go in both directions.
” He leans forward, elbows on his knees.
“I grew up on this water. My dad fished it, Wesley fishes it. You learn early that you don’t fight the tides.
You don’t even really plan around them. You just understand them and work with what the water gives you. ”
He’s quiet for another long moment, still watching the rain streak down the glass.