Total pages in book: 88
Estimated words: 81113 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 406(@200wpm)___ 324(@250wpm)___ 270(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 81113 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 406(@200wpm)___ 324(@250wpm)___ 270(@300wpm)
I think the reason was that it wouldn’t reflect too well on his new celebrity chef dreams to have me telling people that he had helped my wife to cheat on me, and so in every interview, he’d been saying these subtle little jabs, casting just enough shade on me and my career, my cooking, that over the years… business had dwindled.
That fucker. He couldn’t satisfy himself with taking my wife, ruining my marriage and breaking my daughter’s heart? He had to ruin my goddamn restaurant as well, the one fucking thing that I built with my own two hands from the ground up?
Brooke had been heartbroken about the whole thing all this time. I tried to cheer her up in every way I could think of, which was hard enough when I was struggling to even get out of bed some mornings. But she… well. Her mother didn’t just betray me. She betrayed Brooke, too.
Brooke was the sunniest, kindest, happiest person. Her whole life, she had been like that. Then it started to change after Virginia left. Her sweet demeanor cracked. She would get angry. Lash out. Not at me, never at me, even though there were times I might have deserved it. But at her boyfriend, at her classmates and friends, or just at the world in general. The only person spared any anger besides me was her best friend Stevie. I hadn’t seen Steve in three years, not since her and Brooke’s high school graduation a month after Virginia left.
Well, I didn’t think Brooke’s anger was going away anytime soon. The restaurant was in real danger of failing. Maybe I should’ve relocated, opened a new place, but I didn’t want to leave the city where I’d been for so many years and I didn’t want to leave the restaurant that was just as much my baby as Brooke was. My whole life was here and I liked it that way.
Besides. Starting over would’ve felt like giving up. Like failure.
So I took out a mortgage on the family home, but that didn’t do the trick. It felt like everything was falling apart. For the first time since I’d become a chef, I’d started to wonder if I should’ve stayed in tech. Virginia might have liked that better. Maybe she would’ve stayed with me, who could say. My tech job was lucrative, hell, shockingly so, it was how I had the capital to start my restaurant and it was why I’d been in the bay area to begin with, Silicon Valley being just a short bit away.
Or maybe it wasn’t that I should have stayed in the tech sector. Maybe I just shouldn’t have trusted Theo fucking Simmons.
He was fresh out of culinary school and I gave him his first goddamn job. I supported him. Encouraged him. I helped him blossom, I didn’t work him too hard, and I wasn’t too demanding. Didn’t micromanage him. I let him do his thing and gave him room to grow.
And man, had he grown. Theo had thrived and I’d been so damn excited for him. He was nine years younger than I was but he’d been my best friend. Like a younger brother. His menus were exciting, and we even got a Michelin rating.
I didn’t know if I’d ever be able to trust anyone like that again. Not as a chef, and not as a romantic partner. I got screwed over professionally and personally and I honestly didn’t know what to do next.
The was a knock at the door as I stared down at the numbers, wishing that I could just will them to be better.
“Come in.”
Brooke entered.
She looked more subdued lately. Brooke was never gifted academically, bless her heart, but she knew how to read people well and she genuinely cared about everyone. It was why everybody loved her. I knew that she could tell that I was feeling this was the beginning of the end.
“Sorry to bother you, Dad,” she said, walking in with a piece of paper in hand, “but someone wants to apply for the head chef position.”
I had to hold in my sigh. I’d been cycling through head chefs like a… well, like a mad man, I admit. I wanted to find someone with the same spark as Theo, the same passion and flair for originality. But I also wanted them to be someone that I could trust.
So far, nobody had measured up. Everyone just wanted to do the same thing that Theo did, or just wanted to work at the restaurant because Theo had worked there and they were hoping to brag about that. They’d been boring at best and dangerously incompetent at worst. And clearly none of them had a very high opinion of me, as if Theo had just sprung out of the ground a perfect chef, as if I hadn’t been the one to mentor him and guide him into becoming as good as he was now.