Chapter 5 Pain Au Chocolat
Pain Au Chocolat
Poppy
“Poppy, are you awake yet?”
I groan, flopping over in bed as my head pulses unpleasantly. I’ve been half-asleep for hours now, cursing whisky and Jack
Hartman and my own stupid self while trying to forget last night. Maybe if I don’t answer, Julia will leave me alone.
“Mom and Dad are downstairs,” she continues.
Fuck. I stumble to my feet, blowing my hair out of my eyes, and yank open the door. “What?”
Julia takes a step back, looking me over with a critical eye and wrinkled nose. Even though it’s a Saturday, she’s wearing
a linen sheath dress and pearl earrings. Her wedding ring, an heirloom from Caroline’s family, glints obnoxiously on her left
hand. “You slept in that dress? You couldn’t at least put on pajamas?”
“I was drunk.” I cross my arms. “It happens.”
To me, at least. I bet Julia has never gotten so drunk she couldn’t remember how to find her way out of a dress. And if she
ever did, I wouldn’t know about it, because there are four years between us. By the time I was old enough to have any kind
of social life, she was in college.
“At least you didn’t throw up all over it.” She rubs her temples. “This is a mess, Pops.”
As much as I’d like to forget last night, my brain isn’t that kind.
I bite the inside of my cheek as the scene plays in my mind again, movie-like.
The breakup would have been one thing, but my reaction takes it to a different level of embarrassment.
Throw in Jack’s fight with Bret Whittaker, and the whole thing looks like a poorly acted sideshow.
The one silver lining is that I woke up in my own bed, so clearly, I didn’t add to the mess with a drunken display somewhere
public. I turn around, lifting my crumpled hair. Julia sighs but helps me with my zipper.
“I thought Mom was visiting Aunt Shelia,” I mumble as I look for something acceptable to wear.
As usual, my room is a black hole, with clothes and shoes flung in every direction, plus moving boxes from my last apartment.
I’ve been back to living at our parents’ place in Rye since before I met Ryan, thanks to an incident where my apartment autopay
expired and I missed the late notices they kept shoving in my mailbox. Before last night, I’d been looking forward to a future
in SoHo with Ryan. An excuse to finally unpack those boxes.
Straight up forgetting to pay her rent? That’s another thing Julia would never do. I know it was an ADHD-related fuck-up,
but it was mortifying. Especially when I called Dad to help me move out.
“She took the redeye back,” Julia says.
“What?”
“The video is everywhere.” Julia brushes her wavy hair, a darker blonde than mine, over her shoulder. Her tone takes on a
clipped edge. “Start to finish. Tagging you, Pastiche, the Winfield Group—”
I finally find a sweatshirt, the oversize kind I’d never wear in public—or put on my Instagram feed. I yank it over my head.
“Did you know that Dad fired Jack?”
“What does that have to do with anything?”
“Don’t you remember him? He catered your wedding.”
“Of course I do.” Her mouth thins out. “You’re both memes, you know. The internet is having a fun time debating which one
of you had a worse night.”
“No.”
“Yes.”
I scramble toward the bed, upending the pillows to search for my phone. Of course it’s dead; I was too fuzzy headed to plug it in last night. Julia holds out hers with a grim expression.
A quick scroll shows me she’s right. There are photos. Videos. A gleeful TMZ article praising Ryan for cutting me loose, and
far too many memes of my shocked face. I watch a looped video of myself running out of the restaurant enough times to make
my head spin.
And for every three posts about me, there’s one about Jack, too. The hot chef who lost it during service.
I blink rapidly as I stare down at a TikTok declaring me and Jack “a match made in hell.” If only they knew what happened
after.
You ever want round two, you’ll know where to find me.
Yeah, in hell.
I shake my head to get rid of the memory. I’m sure he’s halfway to Florida by now.
I hand Julia her phone after I see the first comment calling me a cunt who didn’t deserve Ryan in the first place. A rogue
sniffle escapes me.
Julia sighs again, but it’s less exasperated this time. She wraps me in a hug, squeezing tightly. “It’s going to be okay,
Pop Tart.”
“I thought he was proposing, Jules.” In the harsh light of day, the assumption feels even more ridiculous. “I thought . . .
I don’t know. That I was finally doing something right.”
Julia rubs my back. “I didn’t like him anyway. You’re too good for him.”
Our four-year age difference has been great in some ways and difficult in others. One of the best parts is that she’s always
been patient when it comes to helping me through my many breakups. Also, since she’s a lesbian, it takes a lot for her to
be impressed by a man.
I laugh wetly. “Dad must be losing his mind.”
“Take a shower, then come down, okay? Caroline brought over a big box of pastries.”
I stall as much as I can in the shower, but eventually, I make my way downstairs.
The more I move around, the more I feel like death warmed over.
I didn’t realize how much whisky I drank until I was in the Uber, leaving Manhattan for the quiet of Rye, New York.
The driver seemed relieved when he dropped me at the gate.
He probably expected me to puke up my guts.
I shut my eyes to stave off the wave of nausea that rises at that thought. I don’t care what handsome guy offers it to me.
I’m never drinking whisky again.
Not that Jack Hartman is particularly handsome, or anything. He just has tattoos and a beard, which ups the hotness meter
for almost every man. Clearly, I’m still not thinking straight.
Before I can sneak into the kitchen in search of coffee, or better yet, one of Caroline’s unfairly delicious pain au chocolat,
I hear Dad’s voice. “Poppy, there you are.”
I’ve had many versions of this conversation over the years. Sneaking out to go to parties at friends’ houses. Hosting parties
here and things inevitably going sideways. Near-arrests (not my fault) and interrupting charity golf matches (definitely my
fault, and weird that it happened twice). My struggles in high school and college, which frustrated my parents to no end.
Julia’s wedding fiasco.
I brace myself with a deep breath before entering the room.
Dad. Mom. Julia and Caroline. Even Miso, my parents’ tiny terrier, is looking at me. Julia isn’t the only one dressed up;
Dad has on his customary suit, Mom’s decked out head to toe in J. McLaughlin, and Caroline, while still wearing the no-skid
clogs she uses in her bakery, has on jeans and a blouse. She offers me a small smile, patting the clip keeping her curly hair
out of her face.
I’ve never felt more like the ugly duckling in my family of swans until right now. I hunch my shoulders, taking a seat on
the nearest couch. I twist my hands in my sleeves. This isn’t even the informal living room. They decided to chew me out in
the extremely fancy, entertaining-only parlor, which has hosted years of Winfield cocktail parties. Fabulous. I’ve been told
I ruined one of them as a little kid. Ran into the room far past my bedtime and accidentally tripped a guest. An old, venerated
chef of a guest.
“Miso,” I say softly.
He doesn’t stray from Dad’s side. My throat tightens.
That is not going to be the thing that makes me cry for the first time today.
Mom and Dad exchange a look. Dad rubs his jaw, leaning in slightly. “How are you feeling, sweetheart?”
“Are you okay?” Mom adds. “Do you need an aspirin or anything?”
I blink. “Um, yeah. That would be great.”
“I’ll get it,” Julia says, giving Caroline’s hand a squeeze as she gets up. “Coffee, too?”
“And a pain au chocolat?”
“Obviously,” Julia calls from the hallway. “That comes with the aspirin.”
A short silence, and then Dad says, “Poppy, just tell me what you were thinking. Unless you weren’t thinking.”
That’s been a common refrain for most of my life. Poppy, why didn’t you think? I bite my lip, fiddling with a loose thread on the sleeve of my pullover. I can sense the tension in the set of Dad’s shoulders,
see the worry in Mom’s hazel eyes.
“Douglas,” she says, “she was just broken up with.”
He presses his lips together. “I know that.”
“In public,” Caroline adds. “Poppy, I’m sorry. That was such a dickish move on his part.”
“So she makes a scene in the middle of a crowded dining room?” Dad says. “At Pastiche, of all places?”
“It’s not like I asked him to take me there,” I mutter.
“You were dating a professional athlete, Poppy.” Dad pinches his nose, shutting his eyes briefly. “And even if you weren’t,
your little social media thing draws a lot of eyes. Anything you do in public is bound to have consequences.”
I don’t bother pointing out the dissonance of calling my career as an influencer “little” while at the same time acknowledging
that my accounts are popular. My parents barely believe I’m making money from it, even when I’ve shown them contracts. It’s
not a real career to them, not in the way Julia is a lawyer or Mom is a magazine editor.
“It was an accident,” I say instead.
“Which part?”
“All of it.”
“All of—Poppy, this could affect the restaurant’s reputation. Did you think about that before causing a scene? Storming out?”
“Obviously not,” I snap. “And what about Jack? What he did was worse, technically, reputation-wise—”
“This isn’t about Jack Hartman.”
I chew on my lip. Mom rubs her temples with her thumbs, something that she does only when a migraine is coming on, or I’ve
exasperated her beyond belief. Naturally, the latter is more frequent.
“Should we issue a statement on behalf of the Winfield Group?” Julia asks as she breezes back into the room, a plate and mug
in hand. She sets it down on the nearest end table before retreating back to Caroline’s side.
I snort as I take the aspirin. “A statement? Why? No one got hurt. Well, except Ryan’s pants. And his ego.”