1. The Braise #2
"But hear me. These hands right here, they lethal in ways your fists could never be.
Anybody can throw a punch. Ain't but a few men alive can take a duck apart in ninety seconds or make a old woman cry over a bowl of gumbo 'cause it tasted like her mama's.
That's the real weapon, Dillion. That's what's gon' outlast every fight you ever get into. "
He'd close my hand into a loose fist, gentle, then open it back up flat, like he was showing me the difference.
"Get it out and be done with it when you got to. But don't you ever forget which hand is the one that's really gon' make your name mean something."
I hadn't needed my hands for anything but cooking in years.
Not since Milan, the night my father and I got into it over the phone about me flying home for the funeral.
He'd said stay, said she'd want me finishing what I started more than she'd want me standing over a casket, said it in that clipped way he talks when he's decided something is settled and doesn't care that it isn't. I hung up on him.
Went out that night and some man I never got a good look at bumped my shoulder hard enough to spill my drink down my sleeve, and something that had been building in me since finding out my grandmother had died found somewhere to go.
I don't remember all of it but, I remember my knuckles the next morning, split across two of them, swollen thick enough that I couldn't close my right hand all the way, and standing in that bathroom trying to test it against the sink edge and feeling something in there that didn't move right.
I remember the fear that came with that more than I remember anything else about that night, a fear that had nothing to do with jail or my father or the funeral I'd missed. I remember thinking, clear as anything, if I broke this hand I wouldn’t have a life.
Not the one I'd been building since I was nine years old standing on a stool in front of my grandfather's stove.
Cooking was my life, the kitchen was my Haven.
I remember the Italian word for assault I had to learn fast, and a restaurant that quietly made the whole thing disappear because a Michelin kitchen doesn't need its rising cooks in a police report.
And I remember standing there afterward looking at my own hands like they belonged to somebody else, finally understanding what my grandfather meant.
My hands were the only inheritance that actually mattered, and I'd almost traded the whole thing for one night I couldn't even fully remember, over a man I never got a good look at, in a language I barely spoke at the time.
My hands stopped being weapons after that night.
No more street fights or losing my temper on strangers who just happened to be standing where my anger landed.
I'd done juvie, I'd done the county. I didn't have another cell in me, and I damn sure didn't have another version of myself left to bury.
So I gave my hands to the kitchen instead.
I could break things there. Bones of a chicken, backs of lobsters, whole animals rendered down to something worth eating.
I could hold a knife the way I used to hold a fist and instead of a cell they gave me a jacket and a title.
Instead of a record they gave me a reputation.
Same violence, dressed up and let loose somewhere it could be talent.
Then came Valentine's Day, 2026. Asher gave me a reason.
That night I did the math on bringing my hands back out.
Really did it, weighed what it would cost to let that part of me walk back into the light, hopefully for the last time.
Turns out my math was wrong. What I actually lost felt like a lung I was still learning to breathe without, randomly catching myself gasping for it.
I'd learn to live without it, though. That phantom lung and the violence both.
"You protected your restaurant and your people. That's noble. You're a man of honor, Dillion, not a danger. You left all that in the past." Madeline said titling her head to catch my eyes, as if trying to bring me back to the present.
I smiled and let her keep it. The truth was too long to get into poolside on a Tuesday morning in June, and she'd built a version of me she could hold in both hands.
Taking it from her would have been cruel.
Grandma used to say the same thing about the gardenias.
People love a sweet thing more when they don't know what the roots had to fight through.
Besides, the news cycle had done what news cycles do.
Ran the story on a loop until it became something else entirely, something cleaner and simpler than what actually happened in that parking lot.
Dillion Duckworth III of Capa Dillion Saves Customer From Belligerent Attacker.
They pulled the magazine piece in alongside it, the one Aurelia had dressed me for and updated the article like the two things had always belonged together.
Roena County's Most Eligible Bachelor Defends His Legacy and everybody loved it.
My mother's phone hadn't stopped ringing since February with women she knew and friends of friends.
Daughters were getting positioned, introductions arranged, invitations to this event and that one, when everyone in Roena County knew the only ones I ever showed up to were the ones my own mother hosted, the ones I couldn't skip.
I'd never had trouble getting women. What was new was the boldness, the way it had gone from subtle interest to open campaign in the space of one news cycle, especially once word got out that the woman I'd saved was exactly that, a woman, despite every string I'd pulled to keep Aurelia's face out of it, keep the footage buried, keep her name out of a single article.
They didn't know who she was. They just knew there was one, and that I'd broken a man in half over her, and something about that made me safer to want out loud than I'd ever been before.
The restaurant continued to fill up, women batting eyelashes and flirting whenever I came to their table at the end of a meal to see if everything had been to their liking.
They'd slip their phone numbers onto the receipts, causing my own staff to shake their heads and laugh at me on my way back to the kitchen.
I was celebrated in every direction I turned.
There was also a small press conference with Mayor Beauregard right there in the restaurant, detailing his favorite dishes off my menu while calling me a stand-up man, saying business owners in Westonberry protect their own, and I smiled and shook hands and accepted all of it.
Then I went home to a penthouse that had stopped getting visits from a woman who could always find a reason to need one.
A woman who wanted to talk about her day in person instead of over the phone, just so she could watch my face while she told me everything about it and catch me if I rolled my eyes at something.
Then Valentine's Day happened and the reasons stopped.
By that June we were in a strange limbo I'd never experienced in our friendship or anywhere else in my life.
At least, I think we were still friends, if you want to call it that.
Texts every few weeks, mostly, dry as stale bread left out overnight.
Hope the restaurant's good. Saw the article, congrats.
Saw you on the news. Punctuation where the jokes used to be, periods standing in for something that used to sound like her laughing at her own joke before she finished typing it.
Then one evening Madeline Dubois walked into Capa Dillion alone, sat at the bar, and caught my eye through the pass like we hadn't lost two decades between us. I'd recognize her anywhere. She wasn't the kind of girl that a boy forgot.
We'd met at a cotillion when we were fourteen, back when my father was still trying to buy his way into the upper rooms of Roena County, one gala and donation at a time.
I was still the version of myself he hadn't sat down yet, all edges, none of them pointed anywhere useful, wearing a rented tux that didn't fit right in the shoulders and knowing everybody in that ballroom could tell.
Madeline came down for the summer from some boarding school in Switzerland, bored in a way that read as elegant instead of rude.
I was smitten the second she looked at me twice. Couldn't have told you why, not then. Just knew she looked at everybody in that room the same unimpressed way, and then she looked at me and something in her face changed, like she'd found the one thing in the whole ballroom that wasn't artificial.
We talked every summer when she came home, spread out over years of run-ins at events our parents both got invited to.
I felt the difference of class between us the whole time and never once said so out loud.
My family was new money learning the choreography.
Hers had been old money long enough to stop noticing her privileges at all.
She never once made me feel it. Didn't have to.
The gap did that work all on its own, in the space between how she said things and how I did, in the fact that she'd been to more countries than I could name by fifteen and I'd been to Charleston twice.
Two years later, sixteen and still nowhere near the version of myself my grandfather was trying to build, I put a boy in the hospital over something I couldn't tell you the reason for now if you asked me straight.
Madeline and I lost touch after that, which was the polite way of saying I became someone her family wouldn't have allowed in her presence anymore.
The impolite way of saying it involved a courtroom.