“You haven’t been. You’ve been...” He pauses to think. “A puzzle to solve. An enigma on legs.”
“An enigma?” I shrug as the waiter appears. “Suppose I’ve been called worse.”
He leans over and speaks to the waiter in French.
I smile at him, and he rolls his eyes before waving his hands around lazily. “Fromage, coq l’orange, vin rouge. I can go on.”
Letting out a cathartic laugh, I join in. “Macaron, pain au chocolat...”
“Wow, you too? See, we have so much in common.” His eyes glow a bright amber in the candlelight before he sits back and sighs. “I guess I just see something in your eyes that reminds me of myself. When I was going through a bad time.” His mouth twists as he contemplates his next words. “Now I think I knowwhocaused the bad time?” It’s phrased more as a question than an assumption.
I wring my fingers under the table. “If I looked like I was having a bad time, it was probably the shrimp canapés?” I let out an emotionless laugh, hoping to lighten the mood, to avoid telling him the truth I so desperately want him to hear.
“You looked like you were grieving.”
My eyes snag on his as I glance up, holding my breath. A bullet of truth hitting me in the chest. Nobody else has ever phrased it that way, but I guess I was grieving. It feels selfish to call it that, knowing other people have been through much worse than me. But I am grieving. Grieving the old me. The fun, carefree version of myself before my life went to shit. Before the pressure to reclaim a life someone else took from me overrode the need to enjoy it.
The waiter reappears with a matching carafe of red wine to the group of friends across the room.
I clear my throat. “What makes you think that?”
He looks down at the table, his fingernail scraping at the wood grain as he considers what to say next. “My dad died last year, dropped dead at his desk from a heart attack. I saw the same thing in you that I’ve been feeling for what feels like forever.”
For a second I’m taken aback, endeared by the thought that he’d be willing to be this vulnerable with me, to crack open the vault for someone he barely knows to peek in. I lean forward, placing my hand over his. “I’m so sorry. Were you two close?”
“Kind of, in the way that you see an adult version of them and they see a kid version of you.” He hesitates for a second. “He wanted me to be an investment banker or something in finance; we had a lot of disagreements about that.”
“He wanted you to be the next Dominic Odericco?” I tease, pulling a small smile from his somber face.
He nods. “But I wanted to be a chef. I always enjoyed and wanted to pursue cooking but got pretty good grades at school, so my dadheavilyencouraged me to get a business degree. A lot of people in my family are in the field, so he thought it would be the best thing for me. Longevity, a career with a path already laid out, I would know how much I was making in five, ten, fifteen years.”
I tilt my head, studying his face. “So no offense but... why are you an assistant?”
He laughs, pouring the wine for me and then himself. His gaze flicks up from his glass in a way that makes my blood fizz. “Do you want the short story or the real one?”
“Hang on.” Holding a finger up, I take a sip of the wine, swilling it in my mouth for a second before swallowing. “Okay, real.”
He looks me up and down. “Were you waiting to see if I ordered shitty wine?” He mimes stabbing himself in the heart. As our glasses hit the table, the waiter appears again with two giant plates of food.
“I was seeing if I needed to order something stronger if we’re about to get into the weeds. Real story please.” I offer up my glass to clink with his, relieved to not have Malcolm at the forefront of my mind for the first time today.
He lifts his glass to mine, not taking his molten eyes off me as thepingof the glasses echoes off the stone walls.
“My dad was a claims manager for this big insurance firm in the U.S. for, like, forty years. Before the funeral, I went to his office to collect his things from his desk.” He sighs before continuing. “But they’d already cleared everything, and someone else had put their things up. Family pictures, trinkets, theirfavorite mug. My dad’s stuff was dumped in a box left in a storage cupboard with an ‘our condolences’ card on top of it, gathering dust, next to the spare pens and printer paper. He gave that firm forty years of his life, and they’d replaced him in a week. The entire time I’d been alive, he’d gone to that same office every morning. His whole career, everything he’d worked for, his entire life summed up in a fucking cardboard box and a life insurance check.”
He takes a breath and runs a hand through his dark hair. “So when my mom insisted I take half the money, I used it to buy a plane ticket and enroll in a culinary school in London. I needed a fresh start, and what better way than to pursue something I’d always wanted to do. Every meal you make touches a different person; you can tell a story through food. When I die, I don’t want my legacy to be a box and a check.”
My brow furrows. “So why are you at TechRumble instead of some Michelin-starred restaurant?”
I watch his throat bob as he takes a large swig of the wine. “For the first couple of weeks of the course, I had this almost manic level of motivation. I was excited by the idea of becoming this incredible chef and meeting people whose dreams aligned with mine. But once the initial adrenaline wore off, I spiraled. I hadn’t processed anything that had happened with my dad. My work got sloppy, sometimes I wasn’t able to get out of bed for days, and I began missing classes, getting behind. At the end of the first year, they told me not to come back for the second. I was devastated, confused, and angry, but I didn’t want to go back home. That felt like the ultimate failure. So I reached out to Dominic and asked if I could crash at his place for a few weeks while I figured things out.”
He shifts, scratching the back of his neck. “Then once the student visa department got wind that I had been kicked out of school, I needed a job to stay in the country. That’s when Dom offered me a full-time assistant role.”
“You never really chose to be where you are now? It just happened to you.”
“I guess, but it was more trying to make the best of a bad situation—turns out you can’t outrun depression.” His face briefly cringes. “I’m good now. Well, settled.”
My mouth twists into a sympathetic, closed-mouth smile. “If cooking is what you love and you have the money saved up, why don’t you do that now?”
