27. Vivienne #4
“Everyone back to work,” he says over his shoulder. “We have forty covers waiting, and we’ve wasted enough time.”
The kitchen starts moving again, slowly at first. People returning to their stations, avoiding my eyes, the sound gradually building back up.
I’m still standing there.
My hands are shaking. My whole body is shaking.
I can’t breathe.
The edges of my vision are going dark. The kitchen is too loud and too hot, and I can’t get enough air. My chest feels like someone’s standing on it. I need to leave, I need to get out, but I can’t move, my feet are rooted to the floor.
“Vivienne.” Derek’s voice echoes from somewhere to my left. “You need to step off the line.”
I try to answer but nothing comes out.
“Now, Vivienne.”
My legs move. I don’t tell them to. I can’t even feel them, but thankfully they move. One step, then another, then I’m walking toward the back door, past the dish pit and the prep cooks who won’t look at me.
I push through the door, and the cold November air hits me, and I make it exactly three steps into the alley before I double over, hands on my knees, gasping.
I can’t breathe.
I try to pull air in, but it won’t come. It catches in my throat and turns into a sob, and suddenly I’m crying. My whole body convulses and I can’t stop it.
I sink down against the wall, my chef’s whites getting dirty from the alley, and I cry until there’s nothing left.
It takes a long time.
My apartment is four subway stops away. I don’t remember the ride.
I sit on my bed in my chef’s whites without turning on the light.
The city noise comes through the window — sirens, car horns, shouting.
I sit in the sounds, and I think about Paris.
The night of the distinction ceremony and the weight of the award in my hands.
That feeling that flooded my system like a door opening onto something enormous.
Walking on a bridge over the Seine at two in the morning with Callum, both of us still in our dress clothes, neither of us wanting the night to end.
How our night did end.
My phone is in my hand, and his name is on the screen.
I have a missed call from him and two new texts asking how the event is going.
I opened the thread on the subway without knowing I was doing it, the pure reflex of years moving my fingers without thought.
When something happens, Callum. That’s the whole equation.
When something happens, Callum will fix it.
I scroll up through the unread messages.
There are forty-one of them. I’ve been going quiet for weeks, and he’s been filling the space between the way he always has, steadily and without pressure.
Simple messages in the way you leave a light on for someone so they can find their way around in the dark.
how’s the sauce station
made the most insane halibut today, you would have lost your mind
okay hear me out on the new floor plan
vivi you okay? haven’t heard from you in a few days
no pressure, just checking in
new floor plan attached. the bar is longer.
I open the floor plan. It’s a photo of a hand-drawn sketch, a sauce stain at the corner, covered in his handwriting.
There’s a table by the window on the west wall with an arrow pointing to it and a note: good vibes corner, still here, don’t worry.
Below that, in smaller writing: this is where you’ll sit when you come to visit.
I look at that for a long time.
He’s working doubles to save for this. He’s mapping floor plans on his days off, and he’s still texting to check in on me when I go quiet.
But he has everything ahead of him. A dream of opening a restaurant.
A town he adores. His family. This life he’s been building toward since before he even met me.
He has so much ahead of him, and he is so completely, entirely confident in himself.
And so am I. I know he’ll do it, that he’ll open the most beautiful restaurant, and that he’ll be happy cooking there.
But I also know — with the specific certainty of knowing someone well enough to finish their sentences — exactly what he would do if I called him right now.
He would get on the next plane out.
He would come here and he would find Stellan Voss and he would do something that cannot be undone, and it would cost him everything. His reputation. The restaurant fund. He would do it without hesitating for a single second because that is exactly who he is, and I love him for it.
I have loved him for it since the first day in Paris when I watched him stand up for a classmate in front of a chef twice his age without even thinking about it, and I cannot let it happen.
I cannot let him burn everything down for me.
I sit with his name on my screen for a long time. The floor plan still open. The good vibes corner. This is where I’ll sit when I come to visit.
My thumb hovers over his contact.
All I have to do is press it and call him. He’ll answer on the second ring, and I’ll tell him what happened and let him be there for me the way he’s always been there.
But if I do that, I lose him. Not the way I’m going to lose him now — where at least he gets to hate me.
He can be angry and move on and build his restaurant and have the life he deserves.
If I call him now, I lose him in a different way.
The way where he destroys everything he’s worked for trying to save me.
Where his name gets tangled up with mine in the worst story either of us will ever be part of.
I can’t do that to him.
I scroll back through the messages one more time. Years of conversations. Years of him being the first person I tell everything to. Years of good morning texts and late night voice notes and pictures of dishes we’re working on and complaints about terrible line cooks and dreams about the future.
Years of us.
My finger hovers over his contact information.
Then I press block.
The phone asks if I’m sure.
No, I want to scream. I’m not sure. This is the worst thing I’ve ever done, and I know it even as I’m doing it.
But I press yes anyway before I can change my mind. Block him on Instagram and on every platform where he could reach me. Block his email. Delete every avenue he has to find me.
Then I go back to our message thread — the only thing left now — and I look at the floor plan one more time.
this is where you’ll sit when you come to visit.
Then I close the thread.
I don’t delete it. I can’t. It’s all I have left of him, and I’m not strong enough to let it go completely.
But I don’t respond.
I lie back on my bed in my chef’s whites, and I look at the ceiling. The city goes on outside my window. It doesn’t know my heart is smashed to pieces. It doesn’t care. It’s just the city, doing what it does, enormous and ongoing, not noticing that something in this apartment just ended.
I close my eyes and I can see Callum waking up tomorrow morning. Reaching for his phone the way he always does. Sending me a good morning text the way he has every single day for years.
Waiting for the response that won’t come.
Trying to call. Getting the blocked message.
Trying Instagram. Finding nothing.
The confusion first. Then the worry. Then the hurt.
And I won’t be there to explain. I won’t be there to tell him it’s not his fault. I won’t be there to tell him I love him and that’s exactly why I’m doing this.
He’ll think I just left. That I got too good for him, too successful, too caught up in my New York life to care about the small-town guy I used to know in Paris.
He’ll think I didn’t care enough to say goodbye.
And that’s what I need him to think. Because if he knew the truth, he’d come for me. And I can’t let him do that.
I lie there in the dark and I breathe.
Okay, I think. Okay.
I guess this is what protecting someone looks like sometimes.
Right now it just feels like the ceiling above me and the city outside are closing in.
I’m sorry, I think to no one, to the ceiling, to the dark, to Callum who will never hear it.
I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.