28. Callum
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Callum
The restaurant is dark.
It’s two in the afternoon on a Tuesday, and Neap & Spring is closed.
The dining room is empty. The chairs are still stacked on tabletops from when I sent everyone home this morning.
The storm is supposed to hit any time now.
It’s predicted to be the kind of coastal storm that makes the national news.
Locally, it just sends everyone scrambling to tape windows and stock up on batteries and move their cars to higher ground.
Through the windows I can see the ocean absolutely raging.
Waves are crashing against the rocks twenty feet higher than normal, sending spray halfway up the cliff face.
The sky is black like someone pulled a curtain over the sun.
The wind is screaming around the building, rattling every window, and testing every seal, finding all the weak points.
The weather service updated the warnings an hour ago.
What was supposed to be a standard storm has intensified into something very dangerous.
Winds gusting to eighty miles per hour. The storm surge is expected to flood the lower coastal roads.
Trees down across the county. Power outages are imminent.
And Vivienne is in that fucking cottage.
That old, weathered, right-on-the-water cottage with the foundation that’s probably older than sand and the windows that don’t seal properly and the roof that Margo’s been meaning to replace for twenty years.
I told myself I’d give her space. She asked for time by herself, and I need to respect that. Showing up at her door when she explicitly said she needs to process everything alone would be pushing. And I refuse to make this about what I need instead of what she needs.
But the wind is gusting hard enough to make the whole building shudder, and all I can think about is her in that cottage, alone, with the storm bearing down.
I’m sitting at the bar in the near-dark, the only light coming from the windows overlooking the churning water.
My phone is face-up on the bartop in front of me with Stellan Voss’s Instagram still open.
I’ve had it open for the past twenty minutes.
Maybe longer. I’ve lost track of time. I have no idea how long I’ve been sitting here staring at this man’s face while the storm builds outside.
He posted three hours ago. Some bullshit about a new tasting menu. It’s a photo of a perfectly plated dish with edible flowers arranged just so. The caption is full of hashtags and mentions and that self-congratulatory tone that makes my teeth ache.
Forty-seven thousand likes. Forty-seven thousand people who think this man is a genius.
Forty-seven thousand people who have no idea what he did to Vivienne. And probably multiple other women throughout the years. How many others were there? How many young cooks did he break before her? How many after?
I pick up my phone, my thumb hovering over the message icon. I’ve done this four times in the past hour and more times than I can count over the past three days. I type out messages, read them back, and delete them before I can hit send.
The first one was long. It was extremely detailed and very specific. It listed exactly what he did and exactly what I thought of him for it.
The second one was shorter. More direct. I stated just the facts.
The third one was threats. Pure, unfiltered rage compressed into three sentences that would probably get me arrested.
The fourth one was a single line: I know what you did to Vivienne Lane, you fucking scumbag.
I deleted that one too.
My finger hovers over the keyboard now, ready to type a fifth attempt.
But what would it accomplish? He’d block me.
Or ignore me. Or worse — he’d respond with some lawyer-written statement about how he doesn’t know what I’m talking about, or how he wishes Vivienne well in her future endeavors and how it’s unfortunate she couldn’t handle the pressure of a professional kitchen.
And I’d lose it completely.
I set the phone down before I can type anything and press the heels of my hands against my eyes hard enough to see spots.
I’ve looked at flights. Sixteen times in the past three days. I know exactly which one I’d take — the early morning out of the regional airport, which connects through San Francisco to JFK, and lands by 3 p.m., giving me the whole afternoon to find him.
I’d find Stellan Voss and wrap my hands around his throat and make him understand exactly what he took from her.
What he took from both of us.
Five years.
The number sits in my chest like a stone.
Five years of her carrying this alone. Five years of me thinking she just didn’t care enough to stay in touch and that she’d moved on to bigger things and better people and a life that didn’t include the small-town guy she used to know.
Five years I could have been with her if he hadn’t broken her so completely she thought she had to disappear to protect me.
Five years we lost because of him.
I push off the bar stool, the legs scraping against the floor in the empty restaurant. I need to move. I need to do something with my hands that isn’t booking a plane ticket or typing another message I’ll delete or finding the nearest wall to put my fist through.
I’ve been doing this for three days. Pacing.
Unable to sit still for more than ten minutes at a time.
I reorganized the walk-in at two in the morning.
I deep-cleaned the flat-top until my arms ached and my hands were raw.
I’ve been doing anything to keep moving and busy.
Anything to keep me from thinking about what I’d do to Stellan Voss if I let myself get on that plane.
After Vivienne told me everything — after I begged her to stay, to please not drive back to that cottage so late, to just sleep here where I could keep an eye on her — she left anyway. She said she needed space to process and figure out what comes next.
I sat on my couch in the dark after she walked out, and I cried. The kind of crying where your whole body shakes and you can’t catch your breath and it feels like something inside you is breaking and slowly dying.
I cried for what he did to her. He systematically broke down someone with so much talent and passion.
Someone so full of fire who was born to be a chef.
And he took that from her. I cried for the fact that she carried it alone for five years because she loved me enough to protect me from my own worst instincts.
She was right to disappear on me. She knew exactly what I’d do if she told me.
I would have gotten on a plane, and I would have found him. I would have destroyed my entire future, burned everything down, just to make him hurt the way she was hurting.
And she couldn’t let me do that.
So she disappeared instead. She chose to lose me rather than let me lose myself.
The wind gusts so hard the entire building groans. Through the windows, I watch a piece of debris cartwheel down the street. The ocean is a wall of violence, waves colliding with each other, churning white foam.
My phone buzzes on the bar.
I cross back to it in three long strides, grabbing it before it can buzz again, hope flaring in my chest for half a second.
It’s not her.
It’s been three days, and I’ve almost pressed the call button seventeen times. I’ve started twenty-three texts I never sent. I’ve driven past her cottage twice just to make sure her car was still there and that she hadn’t packed up and left without telling me.
The only message I’ve gotten from her came two days ago.
I open it now, reading it for probably the hundredth time.
The investors loved the event. They think the restaurant needs a total rebrand to stay viable though. They want to know what you think about changing the name.
That’s it. That’s the only communication I’ve had with her since she walked out of my apartment.
Twenty-eight professional and distant words.
Like we’re colleagues. Business associates. Not —
Not whatever we are.
Changing the name. I huff at the thought even now.
I told her what the name meant. With her feet propped up on my lap and the rain falling outside and her looking at me like I was saying something that was really important to her.
I explained about the tides, about neap and spring, and wanting a restaurant that understood both the ordinary and the extraordinary.
And now the investors want to erase it.
Maybe she agrees with them. Maybe that’s why she sent the message so professionally. Maybe she thinks changing the name is a smart business move and she’s waiting for me to come to the same conclusion.
I don’t know. I can’t know because she won’t talk to me.
It should devastate me. The name. The restaurant. Everything I built. It should matter more than anything.
But the truth is, I really don’t care anymore.
I don’t care about the name. I don’t care about the investors. I don’t care about any of it if she’s not here.
Burn it all down for all I care right now.
But I can’t tell her that because she wants space from me.
I haven’t responded to her message. I’ve typed out responses, but I can’t find the right words. I can’t figure out how to say I don’t care about the restaurant. I only care about you without sounding like I’m putting pressure on her when she explicitly asked for space.
The phone buzzes again in my hand, but it’s just another weather alert. The third one in the last hour.
SEVERE WEATHER WARNING: Coastal flooding imminent. Winds sustained at 75mph with gusts to 85mph. Seek shelter immediately. Do not travel.
I look out the window again, trying to see the cottage five minutes down the road. But visibility is maybe fifty feet now, everything beyond that is just gray water and wind.
The wind screams. Something metal tears loose from a building down the street with a shriek that cuts through even the roar of the waves, followed by a crash.
There’s a pounding at the front door.