“Well, I would call her confident.”
Case opened his mouth and shut it before settling on. “She’s pretty young for that level of confidence. And she’s only really ever worked at”—he picked up the paper in front of him and read—“Slatskeys. Which is a glorified sports bar.”
I had never taken Case for the sexist type. Like ever. He’d always been great to me and treated me with all the respect in the world as his boss. But did he not see... “Okay, but Case, we’re a bar-bar. Nothing glorified about us. Is your issue that she’s female?”
He snorted. “What? My issue with her is her lack of experience. It has nothing to do with her gender.”
“I hope not,” I said patiently.
His cheeks were turning a mottled red. He rarely got embarrassed, so this was slightly amusing, if not a little concerning.
“Listen, seriously, Eliza, I hope you know me better than that. I don’t doubt her skills because she’s a woman. I’m sure she’s fine. And great or whatever. It’s just...”
“What is it?”
He was now fully tomato red. “Okay, listen, I know her, okay?” My eyebrows shot straight up. I hadn’t picked up on that at all. She’d hardly looked at Case. “I mean, she wouldn’t like remember me or whatever. But in my last kitchen, in Charlotte, I hadn’t been... I’d been a shithead. I wasn’t nice. I was doing a lot of recreational drugs. And I made some big mistakes. It was a fucking terrible place to work. My boss was this narcissistic asshole who... Okay, he didn’t make me act out. But he didn’t... he didn’t make things easy on me either. It’s that way in a lot of kitchens. There’s just a lot of—” He was so uncomfortable with the story it took everything in me not to give in to him and just let him have his way. But Joey ticked all of our boxes, and she wanted to start ASAP. So if I couldn’t hire her, I needed a great reason. “That’s why I like it here. I don’t have to deal with the kitchen politics, okay?”
“Okay,” I said gently. My silence let him know it was okay to go on.
“Anyway, she was my replacement.”
“You didn’t act like you recognized her name before the interview.”
“I never officially met her,” he confessed. “I just... saw her... as I was being escorted out of the building.”
Wow, okay. So that was a confession Case probably never wanted to make. Our big sell on Case had been Killian Quinn’s recommendation. As the HR manager, I should have been the one to follow up with his last place of employment. But... I mean, he came with Killian Quinn’s stamp of approval, so what else did I need to know?
And I’d gotten lucky because Case had more than worked out for us.
But it had been shoddy work at best on my end.
Hey, I’d been a new business owner, and much younger. I’d learned my lesson in later years.
“What was the name of your last restaurant?” I asked because that would have at least given Case a heads-up.
“Treble,” he answered. “She didn’t put it on her application. I would have noticed it immediately.”
Yeah, neither of us might have cared about her gender, but past employment was top of our lists. “Does she remember you?” I asked with that same careful tone. I had never had to use kid gloves with Case before, but I could tell he was ready to bolt if I asked him too many personal questions. Which was fair. Whatever kind of employee he’d been at his last job, he wasn’t here. He had never been anything but reliable and dependable. And our kitchen’s success could be solely credited to him.
We might have had other employees go through our kitchen before, especially at the beginning. But Case was the one who had emerged quickly as the best. It hadn’t taken us long before we gave him complete control of the menu. And when he was the last one standing after our grueling, late-night hours and difficult working environment—ahem, Will as the boss—he’d stepped up and hadn’t complained until very recently.
“I don’t know,” he said in a defeated voice. “I was kind of notorious back in the day. But, my hair was longer. And I left Charlotte years ago. So... I just don’t want to open that can of worms. I’m sorry.”
I thought about all he’d shared with me and what it could mean for him to invite trouble he’d valiantly left behind into my kitchen. But... she also ticked all of our boxes.
After weeks of interviewing, I knew that would be very hard, maybe even impossible to replicate. “Think about it,” I told him neutrally. “Get through tonight, sleep on it, drink on it if you have to, whatever, just... marinate on Joey Daniels. We don’t have to decide anything yet, okay?”
He worked his jaw back and forth. “You’re really not even going to consider Brent?”
I shot him a look. “Are you serious? We don’t need that dude-bro energy in here. We have enough of it.”
His mouth split into a small smile. “He’s not bad at what he does though.”
“Yeah, but from the sound of it, it’s a lot of fried foods and barbecue. While I love both of those food groups, we’re just not that place.”
He stood and grabbed his things. “Yeah, true. It was worth a shot.”
“Think about Joey,” I called after him as he headed for the kitchen.
