Chapter 6
By the end of the first week, Tanisha was going out of her mind.
She had never gone seven days without working in her adult life.
She had built Hot Honey out of fourteen-hour days, burned forearms and early-morning prep lists.
Now she lived in a limestone palace with a staff that materialized to do every task before she could reach for it, and she had nothing to do but exist, beautifully, as set decoration in someone else's life.
She read every book in the brass-railed library that interested her.
She walked the grounds until she knew every oak.
She watched the Bugatti through the garage window like it was a tiger at a zoo.
The only thing keeping her sane was the phone calls.
She called Renata most nights, the two of them talking for an hour at a stretch, Renata propped behind the register of her Nashville bakery doing the books while Tanisha wandered the cold marble halls of a billionaire's house describing rooms she couldn't believe she was allowed to be in.
"There is a ladder," Tanisha said one night. "On a rail. In the library. Like in a movie about the man who owns a horse."
"Stop it."
"I am not making this up, Ren. There's a Bugatti in the garage that's worth more than everything either of us has ever earned combined, and the man told me I could drive it, like that's a normal thing to say to a person."
"Did you drive it?"
"I will not be driving it. I'd sneeze and total three million dollars." She'd lowered her voice. "How's the truck? How's the lunch rush without me?"
"Slower," Renata admitted. "People ask about you. I tell them you eloped with a hot Russian, and they think I'm joking and I let them." A pause, gentler. "How are you, though? Really. Not the marble-and-Bugatti show. You."
Tanisha had stood in the dark hallway and had not quite been able to answer, because the truth was, I'm starting to like him, Ren, and that terrifies me more than Dorian does, was not a thing she could say out loud yet, not even to Renata, not even to herself.
Mama Boone was easier and harder at the same time.
Her grandmother did not ask how Tanisha felt; she asked whether she was eating, if the man was kind to her, whether she'd found a church she liked, and when Tanisha said she hadn't, Mama Boone had sniffed and said a person who didn't make friends in a new city was just rehearsing for loneliness.
Then she'd told a long, winding story about a woman from her own church choir who'd married a Greek shipping man in 1971 and lived very happily in Athens for thirty years despite never learning more than four words of Greek, and the moral of the story, as far as Tanisha could tell, was that her grandmother had already made up her mind about Yegor and was simply waiting for everyone else to catch up.
"You sound different, baby," Mama Boone had said, right at the end of that call. "Lighter. I don't know what that man's doing, but you sound lighter than you have in two years."
Tanisha had not known what to say to that either.
And then she discovered the kitchen.
The household chef was an anxious man named Ferdinand who guarded his domain like a dragon over gold, and the negotiation took the better part of an hour and most of Tanisha's considerable charm.
"This is my kitchen," Ferdinand said.
"I know."
"Mr. Tarasoff hired me personally."
"I'm sure he did. Ferdinand. I'm not trying to take your job.
I had a Michelin-starred chef in Seoul tell me my fried chicken made him want to call his mother.
I just need to cook something. Anything.
I'm losing my mind in this house. Please.
One night. You can supervise. You can taste everything.
You can throw me out the second I touch your mise. "
Ferdinand had narrowed his eyes, then sighed the sigh of a man who recognized a fellow obsessive when he met one.
"You may use the kitchen at night," he said. "After ten. When I am gone. And you will clean it so it is as if you were never there."
"Deal."
*****
She found Yegor still working at midnight.
She'd made the sandwiches first, there was something steadying about the old motions, dredging the chicken thighs, the hot oil, the slow build of the hot honey on the stove with its slick of gochugaru, butter and a whisper of soy, the bright crunch of the kimchi pickles she'd quick-brined that afternoon out of cabbage she'd bullied Ferdinand into ordering.
Two sandwiches, fried chicken thigh on a soft potato bun, hot honey dripping, pickled kimchi tucked in like a secret.
The smell filled the enormous kitchen and, for the first time in a week, the house felt like somewhere a person actually lived.
She wasn't sure why she made two.
She told herself she didn't know who the second one was for, right up until she was carrying both of them down the hall toward the strip of light under the study door.
He was at his desk, sleeves rolled, three monitors glowing, a half-finished glass of vodka going warm at his elbow, and he looked up when she pushed the door open with her hip, his eyes went from her face to the plates with an expression of pure, undisguised confusion.
"It's midnight," he said.
"I know what time it is."
"What is that?"
"Dinner." She set one plate down on the only clear corner of his desk. "You didn't eat. Stanislav told me. He says you forget to eat when the markets do something. I think that's a stupid way to run a body."
Yegor looked at the sandwich like it might be a trick.
"I have a chef," he said.
"You have a sandwich now. Eat it before the honey soaks the bun. There's a window. You missed it once already arguing with me, you don't get to miss it twice."
He picked it up and took one bite.
And Tanisha watched a billionaire, a man who could have flown a Michelin-star chef across the ocean for a snack, look at the fried chicken sandwich halfway to his mouth.
Then he took a bite. He lifted his face to hers with a dazed, slightly betrayed look of a man who had just been shown that he'd been living his whole life wrong.
"What," he said, slowly, around the bite, "is this?"
"It's a sandwich, Yegor."
"Tanisha." He swallowed. He set it down with great care, as if it was a piece of evidence. "What is this?"
She felt something warm, proud and long buried unfurl in her chest. She pulled the second plate up and sat down across from him in the leather chair where his terrifying lawyers usually sat, and for the first time since Vegas, she started to open up to someone new.
"It's called Hot Honey," she said. "It's mine. One truck. Black Southern food crossed with Korean. My grandmother's recipes and a year I spent in Seoul on a culinary scholarship, all jammed into one menu because I couldn't decide which half of myself to be, so I decided to be both."
"You studied in Seoul?"
"On scholarship. Full ride. I was twenty-three.
I was going to stage in three different restaurants, work my way up, maybe open something of my own over there.
" She turned the sandwich on the plate. "Then my grandmother got sick.
Mama Boone. She raised me, my parents weren't in the picture, my dad died when I was young, he flew helicopters in the Gulf War, came home and then a bad heart took him anyway.
So it was always me and Mama Boone. And when she got sick, I came home, because there was never a version of my life where I didn't come home for her.
She got better. I never went back to Seoul. I built the truck instead."
Yegor had stopped eating.
"And the competition," he said. "In Vegas. That's what you were there for?"
"Best New Southern Concept. Regional. I won.
" A laugh broke out of her, surprised and a little bitter.
"I won, Yegor. The same night I lost my entire life of hiding; I won the biggest thing I've ever won.
I accepted it with the condition that they keep my face off camera.
I was so careful. And then two hours later I'm on a livestream marrying you.
" She shook her head. "The dream was a brick-and-mortar.
A real building, a real Hot Honey, with a roof, a sign and a second location someday.
I had a whole business plan. I had napkins covered in sketches. "
"Why is it past tense?"
She looked at him.
"Because brick-and-mortar takes capital I don't have," she said simply.
"Because after this is over, I'm relocating to a city where nobody knows my face, under a name that isn't mine, to be safe.
You can't build a brand on a name you're hiding from.
The dream and the safety don't fit in the same suitcase.
I picked the suitcase that keeps me alive. "
Yegor was quiet for a moment. Then, to her surprise, he didn't offer to fix it. He didn't reach for his checkbook or his lawyers. He asked a question.
"What's your food cost on this?" He nodded at the sandwich. "Per unit. Out the window of the truck."
She blinked. "What?"
"Your margins. The chicken, the bun, the honey, the labor. What does this cost you to make and what do you sell it for?"
And then they were off.
He asked her about supply chains and she told him about the gochujang importer who kept jacking up his prices.
He asked about her commissary kitchen rent and her permit costs and what a second truck would do to her unit economics versus a fixed location.
She found herself drawing on a legal pad from his desk, real numbers, the sketches she hadn't let herself look at in months, and he leaned in over the desk and asked the sharpest, most useful questions anyone had ever asked her about the thing she loved most in the world, and not once, did he make her feel small for any of it.
"You'd buy your kimchi cabbage cheaper at volume if you committed to a fixed location," he said, tapping the legal pad. "Trucks make you a price-taker. A building makes you a buyer. You're being penalized for staying small."