But even my rose-tinted glasses can smell the shit in the letter.
This is my chance,the voice in my head shouts.What I’ve been waiting seven years for. A shot at my own restaurant.
Salt + Spice could be open, just months from now. Executive Chef Wilder Amante etched in the glass doors.
It just feels too good to be true.
Like there’s a trap in there somewhere I’m not seeing.
“Chef!” The back door bursts open, Charlie stumbling out of it, eyes alight.
“Yeah?” The letter gets shoved back in my pocket, crumpling as it goes.
“You’ve gotta see it. I did it. Me! I did it!”
Kicking off the wall, smile pulling my mouth up at one side, I follow him as he practically skips to the line, hands gesturing the whole time.
“It was just like you said, the crepe, and then I flipped it, and somehow it turned out perfect.”
Halting next to him, I lean over to inspect his dish.
Perfect lemon and blueberry crepes.
Even my pickiest French instructor in culinary school would’ve raised an impressed eyebrow at this plating.
“Damn, Chef,” I tell him, one hand thumping his back. His knees give out and he sinks a good six inches, but he regains his stature with a beaming grin. “You did it.”
Pulling him into a bro hug, our hands stay connected in the shake for a second as I smile at him proudly.
When I look down at our clasped hands, the word FREE is staring back at me.
What am I doing?
Risking my freedom again by taking a deal from my old connections?
So what if this place isn’t Salt + Spice. I’m shaping my own menu here, leaving my flavor on this town in the now, with the help of these people by my side.
Helping Charlie master basic skills in the kitchen, watching Lexi bloom as she stacks wins, and seeing dozens and dozens of smiles on faces in that dining room day in and day out, because of what I’m doing?
It might not look like the dream I always thought it would, but sometimes gifts come in different packaging than we expected to see.
And this place here? This life of mine I’ve built over the summer? I think it might just be the dream I never knew I had.
I can’t just walk away without trying to help them.
“Chef,” I call to Charlie and he perks up, looking back at me. “You’re in charge today. I’ve gotta go do something.”
He salutes me as I take off my jacket, hanging it in the small break room and taking off out the back door, down the alley, through the crosswalk between blocks, and across the street.
It’s not minutes before I’m the one bursting through a door. This time it’s Rory’s.
She looks up from her desk, unsurprised.
“I need to talk to you.”
The humof my motorcycle drowns out the noises of summer at night in the Smokies, the shadowed ridges edged in the last hues of sunset. The rumble of the bike between my legs soothes me as I drive, and my mind feels free to unpack the last ten days.
The way Rory’s eyes had bulged out at the contents of the letter confirmed what I already knew.
