“Crash anytime,” Bianca says. “If anyone gives you grief, tell them the chef invited you.”
She squeezes my forearm quick and friendly, and slips back through the swing door. I stand for a breath longer in the quiet dining room, the ocean quiet beyond the glass, and picture a Thursday night where the first guests step in and know that they belong. Then I pull my tape measure, mark my cocktail-pass notes, and get back to work.
Chapter Six
Roberto
I stay out of Marketing on purpose.
It isn’t difficult to avoid their corridor. The admin space gives you a dozen ways to get where you’re going without stepping past the frosted panes. I know the detours by heart now: lift to three, cross to operations, take the long hall that passes the back of the banquet kitchens and the loading dock doors with their dented kick plates, then climb one flight and you’re on the level where Caterina presides over the project like a conductor. Easy. Deliberate.
Stupid.
It doesn’t keep Olivia out of my head.
I try the usual remedies. I front-load the day with motion and habit: work out until my muscles burn in a way that feels good, the razor I run down my jaw with a mind that I don’t let wander, espresso that jolts me awake.
I answer emails before the sun makes a path across the bay. I start my car and follow the same path each day, to the courthouse, to my office, to the casino.
The routine helps. A little.
But not enough.
Today, I’m heading to the casino for a brief meeting with Caterina. Twenty minutes total, maybe thirty. That’s the promise I make myself. I just hope I can keep it.
I park in the same row as always in the garage. The hallway smells like fresh paint. A contractor with a coil of cable nods. I nod back.
I could go straight to the elevator that will take me to Caterina’s floor. It would be the best choice. The easiest. But I’ve been wanting to see the restaurant since they brought the tables in a few days ago. It’ll just take a minute.
The corridor narrows toward the restaurant. The air shifts, and a breeze flows past me. Someone has a fan running to make a painted wall dry a little faster. I’m a step away from where the door is when I hear her.
A laugh.
It is brief, unguarded, and it sucker punches me in the gut before I can guard myself against it. It stops my breath for a moment, and the warmth works its way through me.
I don’t like that I notice it. I like even less that I can recognize it so quickly from our brief time together.
I stop before rounding the doorway. If anyone saw me, they’d say I paused to read the piece of paper taped to a wall. A fire exit diagram. But that’s not the truth. I stand because I’m stupidfor a heartbeat.
Her voice flows out the door to me.
“—no, if we squeeze a seventeenth in there, we’ll turn the aisle into a traffic stop,” she says. “Fourteen for the first week. I want the servers to learn the room at speed, not in a panic.”
A second voice answers, lower, agreeable, unhurried. Gina.
“Fourteen it is,” she says. “You want the lounge menu cards at the high-tops on Thursday or Friday?”
“Friday,” she answers. “Thursday is for the people we want to welcome like family. I was discussing with Bianca a possible fixed menu for Thursday. Different choices, of course, but the point is the family style. The food will be elegant and delicious, but it’ll feel comfortable. Like Sunday dinner, you know? They won’t need a menu to feel welcome.”
It’s a good answer. It fits the plan she sold in the room where I sat and pretended it was the only thing that held my attention. It makes me want to say yes to something I shouldn’t be saying yes to at all.
The voices continue discussing plans for the opening weekend.
She laughs again, a little ribbon of sound that threads through me. It is not loud, not coy, not performed. It is exactly what it is.
I consider rounding the corner. It would take one step. I could come into view like I meant to. I could be casual and professional, one of the owners who wants an update. I could ask a question—“How many covers Friday?”—andI could watch her face when she answers easily because she already knows everything off the top of her head.
My feet don’t listen.
