26. Vivienne #2
“That’s kind of what life is, isn’t it?” he continues.
“Most of it is just the neap tides. You get up, you open the restaurant, you prep, you cook, you break down the kitchen, you do it again. Every day is moderate and manageable. And then sometimes —” He stops and takes a deep breath.
“Sometimes the spring tide comes in, and everything goes as high or as low as it can possibly go. Sarah. The embezzlement. Losing you.” He looks at me.
“Opening night. My dad’s face when we unlocked the door for the first time.
” He rubs a slow circle against my ankle. “You walking back through it.”
I think about the dining room and the windows running the full length of the wall. The ocean visible from every single table, impossible to ignore, like it was designed that way, which it obviously was. He did it deliberately. So everyone could see the tides.
“I wanted a restaurant that felt like that,” he says. “Like it understood both. A space that could hold the ordinary days and the extraordinary ones and not treat one as more important than the other. Like it belonged to the rhythm of this place instead of being imposed on it.”
I stare at him in awe. The ink disappearing up both forearms under his pushed-up sleeves. The dark wavy hair that is longer on top, still slightly damp from the rain. The mustache, the sharp jaw, the blue of his eyes in the low lamp light.
“I almost didn’t keep it,” he says in a hushed tone.
“After Sarah. There was a period where I thought I would just sell it and cut the loss. Go somewhere no one knows me and do something else entirely.” He says it like he’s admitting something he hasn’t said out loud many times.
He picks up his water glass again, turns it once, sets it back down.
“My dad talked me out of it. He sat me down at the kitchen table but didn’t do anything else.
He just sat there. And eventually I heard myself saying I wasn’t ready to give it up, and he just nodded like that was the only answer he’d been waiting for. ”
“Good ol’ Patrick,” I say, a smile tugging at my lips.
“Good ol’ Patrick.” He almost smiles back. “He does this thing where he doesn’t tell you what to think. He just waits until you figure it out yourself and then acts like that was always going to happen. Like he knew you’d get there.”
“He did that at Sunday dinner,” I respond. “When everyone was sharing their highs and lows. He just waited.”
“He’s always been like that,” Callum says. “My whole life he’s just been waiting.” The almost-smile becomes real for a second, and he shakes his head. “It drives me insane.”
“It’s a good quality.”
“It’s an infuriating quality that I’ve come to depend on completely.”
I laugh, and he laughs, and for a moment it’s easy, the lamp and the rain and both of us laughing on his couch at midnight, and it’s so uncomplicated that it almost undoes me.
I look at my water glass. I look at the rain on the window. I look at his hand resting against my ankle.
There’s something I’ve been carrying for five years, and it’s heavy the way that things get heavy when you’ve been holding them by yourself for too long.
The muscles have compensated so thoroughly that I’ve forgotten I’m even doing it.
I’ve gotten very good at not feeling the weight.
I’ve gotten very good at a lot of things that aren’t actually good.
“I owe you something,” I whisper.
His hand stills on my ankle.
“I’ve owed you it for a long time.” I keep looking at the window.
“I’ve been trying to figure out how to say it since I got here.
Since before I got here, really. Since the moment I saw your name on that file and had to figure out if I could actually do this.
” I stop and breathe through my nose. “And then I walked in and you were so angry and I thought, Angry is easy. Angry I can work with.” I look at my hands.
“And then you stopped being angry and started being you again, and the version I’d prepared fell apart completely. ”
His thumb starts to move against my ankle again slowly, encouraging.
“I’d been rehearsing it since day one,” I murmur to the rain.
“Very clean, and very organized. In and out. Give you the facts, take responsibility, and move on.” I almost laugh.
“And then you were a real person and not just the one I’d been managing in my head for five years, and none of it worked the way I’d planned. ”
He doesn’t say anything. He just waits, and I understand now exactly where Callum learned it. It’s the way Patrick waits. From all those kitchen table conversations where Patrick just sat and let him find his own answers.
I turn my water glass in my hands. Set it down. Pick it up again. Set it down.
“In New York,” I start then stop, trying to shake off the panic creeping up my hands.
I look at the opening night photo. Patrick’s hand on Callum’s shoulder. All of them laughing.
I turn my gaze to him. This man who held me through a panic attack behind his restaurant and asked nothing in return.
Who remembered, five years later, the exact way I take my coffee.
Who has been standing in his own kitchen every single day trying to hold onto something he built because he loves it and because it belongs here.
“Callum,” I breathe.
“Yeah, Vivi?” His voice is soft and patient.
His eyes find mine. And they are steady and completely present and safe.
“I think I’m ready,” I say. “To tell you the truth.”