“A dare,” I repeat, to make sure he hears how ugly the word sounds.
“Yes,” he says, trying for charming again, and it bounces off my stare like a rubber ball off concrete. “I lost a dare. And the dare was to work a real job, at a business I invested in, for a month. So…” He spreads his hands, like he’s presenting himself. Like he expects applause. “Here I am.”
Here I am.
I look at him.
I look at his hands again. Clean. Soft. Unscarred. Hands that have never been split open by cardboard boxes or burned by a tray that came out of the oven too fast. Hands that probably haven’t touched sanitizer unless it came in a designer bottle labeled in French.
I look at his uniform. Sterile white, crisp, custom-tailored. Not the kind of chef whites you wear in a real kitchen. The kind you wear in a movie about a kitchen, where no one ever sweats, and the lighting is always flattering.
Two thousand dollars, minimum. Possibly more. Probably more than my walk-in freezer.
I look at his face. Earnest. Confused. Handsome in a symmetrical, billboard way. Like he belongs in an ad, not standing on my doorstep at five in the morning while my butter costs are up twelve percent and my margins are practically translucent.
I think about my spreadsheets.
I think about butter.
I think about the dream. The real dream, the one I keep in a separate notebook because it is too tender to put in a spreadsheet. Even though I tried. A paid apprenticeship program for marginalized youth. A way to give kids who grew up like me a skill, a trade, a future that is not luck-based.
And this man, this walking investment check, has the power to make that dream real with a single phone call.
And he is here because of a dare.
As a joke.
As content.
Something sharp and acidic rises in my throat, two years in the making. All the 4 a.m. mornings. All the eighteen-hour days. All the nights I sat on my apartment floor crying over invoices. All the panic of keeping this place alive, keeping his investment alive, while he forgot.
Gwen appears at the prep room door, eyes wide, holding a block of butter like it is a weapon. She does not say anything. She does not have to. Her face is a silent, stunned witness to the universe’s cruel sense of humor.
I take a deep breath. Slow. Controlled. I taste flour in the air. Yeast. Cardamom. The faint tang of sanitizer. The smell of my life.
I could throw him out.
I absolutely could.
It would be satisfying. It would be righteous.
It would also be incredibly stupid because he is still technically my investor.
“What do you know about a bakery?” I ask. Gwen chuckles somewhere behind me.
“Nothing,” Leo says confidently.
“What do you know about sourdough?”
“Nothing.”
“About oven settings?”
“Nothing.”
“You are really selling yourself well,” Gwen laughs from behind the counter.
“Besides your dare, why do you want to work here? My business isn’t some kind of joke,” I say, and I notice my voice sounds sharper than I intended.
