She wasfromNew Bedford, an old whaling town in southern Massachusetts next door to Rhode Island. It was New England who had raised her.
But she lived in Maryland now. Her ex-husband David had commuted to DC and she commuted to Baltimore; they had lived between the two in suburbia for the six years of their marriage. She had contemplated moving to Baltimore proper when she moved out last year, but she ended up sticking to what she knew. Because everything, from getting up in the morning to feeding herself, had felt hard, and sticking to what she knew felt like the only option. She found a small apartment in their same dull town, even though she no longer felt any real allegiance to it, to its string of mini-malls and chain restaurants. She wondered, at times, if she ever had.
David had moved to Arlington.
So at least she didn’t have to worry about running into him at the Food Lion.
The small set where theChef’s Specialcontestants would film their solo interviews was tucked in a back corner of the sound stage, beyond the wooden archway, next to craft services. A thick, marbled window lit from behind and made of stunning turquoise glass took up the entire back wall. It was beautiful, and it soothed Dahlia immediately when she walked in the room, even if it didn’t give her any better ideas of what to say.
She sat on a stool. She blinked while the camera focused on her, while PAs adjusted the lights. The young woman behind the camera with short, tightly curled hair peeked out at her and smiled, full of friendly vibes.
“Hey, Dahlia. I’m Maritza. Remember, we just need the basics here. Start with your name, age, location. Good to go?”
Dahlia nodded numbly. Wordlessly, Maritza counted off with her fingers and then gave the signal.
“My name is Dahlia. I’m twenty-eight and originally from Massachusetts.”
Her mind blanked.
Maritza bopped out from behind the camera again. “Okay. Something about your career, and why you’re here?”
Right. Sure.
Except Dahlia didn’thavea career.
She had worked as a copy editor at a small Baltimore paper for the last four years, and enjoyed it for the most part. She had always liked writing and editing, and the work was interesting sometimes. More and more of the paper was simply canned from larger news wires, but the local beats their reporters still got to cover felt important. She liked her coworkers, especially Josh, who covered their online marketing and social media, who made her laugh and had always treated her with respect.
But she’d become restless these last couple of years after so many days in the same cubicle, never moving on to something bigger, better, more challenging.
Dahlia had dreams, but vague, blurry ones, dreams that held no concrete value. Seeing the world. Doing something she was passionate about, something meaningful. She simply had no idea what that somethingwas. She worried that if she made cooking her career dream, she’d lose the joy in it. And sometimes, this last year, it felt like that joy was all she had.
Dahlia didn’t want to own a restaurant, or even work in one, but cooking meant something to her now, something primal and important. When her mental health and her marriage started to break down two years ago, far before she fully understood either of those things was happening, it was cooking that calmed her. Made her feel productive and useful.
Cooking made her mind focus on something other than herself.
And then, as she started getting better at it, as she started cooking more not because she had to but because she wanted to, she started to stray away from strict recipes to rely on instinct and knowledge alone. And that? That made her feel creative and powerful—two adjectives she had forgotten to associate with herself. And then it wasn’t just a distraction. Cooking held the possibility of helping Dahlia Woodson find herself again.
She was still working on that part. Finding herself again.
Because other than being really good at chopping vegetables and making homemade pasta, other than knowing she wanted to get the hell out of Maryland suburbia, Dahlia understood who she was less and less with each passing year. Like she was growing up wrong.
But she couldn’t say any of that to the camera. She couldn’t talk about her student loans.
So Dahlia swallowed, tried to smile, and said the most generic thing she could think of.
“I only started cooking seriously a few years ago, so I’m really excited for all I can learn here.”
Maritza nodded. “Good.” Her head swiveled to another PA as she checked notes on her phone. “AJ, can you go get Khari next?”
Dahlia left the room, worried, with a mortifying rush of shame, that she might cry.
She had never wanted to be a generic person.
She walked to craft services and shoveled down ten grapes without tasting a single one.
Dahlia was acting differently today, and London didn’t like it.
Maybe they didn’t have the right to judge how Dahlia Woodson did or did not act, considering they had barely known her for twenty-four hours. But they had spent at least eight of those hours yesterday staring at the set of her shoulders, the angle of her neck as she leaned forward in concentration at her station, the way she unconsciously shuffled her weight from one foot to the other when she was anxious. The way her cheeks swelled when she smiled.
