Diana furrowed her brow. Her eyes traced a line across the awful sight before them: the burned-out windows, the charred doorway, the black interior. The Coleman sign that hung above the windows was now crooked and dark.
“Let’s get out of here,” Diana said. “They’ll call you if they need anything else.”
Rachelle followed Diana through the snaking alleyways to a beautiful piazza that glowed in Italian sunlight. They sat at a table and ordered a carafe of white wine. Diana continued to look at Rachelle, worried. Rachelle remembered how, months ago, she’d quit working in Diana’s kitchen, telling Diana that it was finally time for her to strike out on her own.
“I don’t know what to do,” Rachelle told her ex-boss now.
Diana shook her head. “There’s no rule book for this.”
“I mean, I have insurance, I guess.” Rachelle sighed. “But it’s not enough for me to completely refurbish the restaurant and make it into what it was. I was already dipping into my savings, trying to make everything work. I was counting on summer revenue. I knew that we wouldn’t be in the black till autumn, but I trusted myself. I trusted what we could create. And now?” Her head rang.
Diana squeezed her hand over the table. Rachelle sensed that she didn’t know what to say. Diana herself had opened many restaurants over the years. She’d been a world-renowned chef for longer than Rachelle had been conscious, it seemed.
“You know you can come back to work for me if you want to,” Diana offered. “You’re my number-one priority. My number-one sous chef. I can make space in the schedule.”
Rachelle felt it like a stone on her chest. To return to Diana’s kitchen was to take four hundred steps backward.
“I know it doesn’t sound appealing after creating your own place,” Diana said.
Rachelle squeezed her eyes shut, thinking about the rent she had to pay not only for her restaurant, but also for her apartment. She thought of groceries and the vacations that she and Riccardo wanted to plan. She thought of everything she’d accounted for, all the spreadsheets she’d made. She needed a job. She knew that.
“You’re probably my only hope right now,” Rachelle said, forcing herself to open her eyes.
“It’s not forever,” Diana assured her. “You’re going to reopen your place. You’re going to make it everything you dreamed of. This is an enormous setback and completely unfair. But you’re going to get through this.”
Rachelle wasn’t entirely sure she believed Diana. But she knew, too, that she was in such a grim headspace that any sense of optimism felt like a foreign language.
Diana insistedon taking Rachelle for food after their glass of wine. They ducked into a cab and went to the opposite side of the city, where one of Diana’s longtime chef friends had recently opened a tapas place. Rachelle felt every eye on her as she entered, as though every foodie in the city had learned about her hardship and felt pity for her.
Diana and Rachelle grabbed seats at a long table, where they fell into conversation with a few of Diana’s friends. One of them, a woman from Paris who’d opened a number of restaurants across Italy and Switzerland, furrowed her brow at Rachelle and said, “Tell me they know who did it.”
Rachelle was taken aback. “It was an accident,” she said. “It must have been.”
“But you did everything you were meant to do,” the woman said. “I’m sure you passed every safety code. I’m sure your people did everything right.”
“They did,” Rachelle affirmed. “They did everything right.”
A strange look passed between Diana and the Parisian woman, one that Rachelle couldn’t translate. She filled her mouth with wine. She hated that she was pretending to fit in with these people—people who’d founded so many restaurants, who’d manned so many kitchens, who’d been written up in countless magazines. Rachelle had imagined herself a part of their world, had envisioned that they’d welcome her soon. Now, they welcomed her with pity, which was the same as not including her in their ranks at all.
“She’s going to rise again,” Diana said.
“But if someone is after her,” the Parisian woman said. “If someone doesn’t want her to succeed, what happens then?”
“Aude, you’re always on about your conspiracy theories.” Diana laughed. “Rachelle and I are American. We’re realistic. We know that accidents happen, no matter how much you fight against them. That’s why there’s insurance.”
“But the insurance is never good enough,” Rachelle muttered into her cocktail.
“Not unless you’re wealthy,” Aude affirmed with an ironic laugh.
Rachelle knew that Aude wasn’t raised wealthy, that she’d had to climb the ranks into the wealthy in order to be who she was now. She knew that because Aude had a chip on her shoulder.
Rachelle hadn’t been raised wealthy, either—not even on Nantucket Island, where it seemed that nearly everyone had money. Growing up, her mother hadn’t spoken to her own mother and father, and hadn’t indulged herself in their wealth at all. Later, when Rachelle was in her early twenties, her mother had begun a relationship with Estelle, Roland, and the rest of the Colemans. She’d also inherited Great-Aunt Jessabelle’s iconic mansion on the water. It meant there was money, now—but not necessarily money in the bank. And Rachelle didn’t talk to any of them, anyway. It meant there was no lifesaver. No quick fix.
It was true, too, that Rachelle hadn’t opted for the very best insurance. She’d gotten the basic version, the version meant to protect her employees before herself and her place. It meant that if her employees had been injured in the accident, everything would have been okay. Nobody had been injured, thank goodness. But Rachelle would take the monetary hit.
“I don’t want to give up the place,” Rachelle said, although nobody had asked her outright. “I’m going to keep paying the rent. I’m going to find a way to reopen.”
Diana offered a polite, if nervous, smile. “She’s coming back to work with me.”
