He lets go and steps back, looking at me one last time.
“Goodbye, Serena.”
“Goodbye, Ethan,” I say.
He walks toward the waiting taxi at the curb. I watch him get in. I watch the taxi pull away. I wait for grief, anger, regret, any of the large emotions people expect from endings. What comes instead is quiet.
I start walking back to Le Marais. The city moves around me in warm evening pieces. By the time I reach my hotel street, the relief has settled into me fully. I know I’m finished with Ethan. I know it without anger, without bitterness, without needing to punish either of us for the fact that we did not survive what he broke.
The lobby is quiet when I enter, and the woman at the front desk gives me the same discreet nod she always gives. Upstairs, my room is dim and warm. The flowers Ethan brought sit in the hotel vase by the window, beautiful and already beginning to look like they belong to a different woman’s evening. I take off my earrings, set my phone on the desk, and stand there for a moment with the city moving below me.
I’ve finally told Ethan the truth. But now I have to really think about how I feel about Damien, and what is even possible with him. I don’t know why that feels harder.
Chapter Twenty-One
Damien
By the time I reach Maison Holt the next morning, I’ve already decided what the facts are—although that’s not the same thing as believing them. Serena Cole is reviewingmyrestaurant.I’mthe chef whose work she will judge in print. Whatever has happened outside that framework has been operating beyond the professional perimeter I should have maintained from the beginning.
I saw her outside of a restaurant near the Palais-Royal with a man I did not recognize. His hand was on her arm, and her body still enough under his touch to make the image land where it had no right landing. I don’t know who he was, but I know exactly how it felt to see him touch her.
The kitchen is dark when I enter through the side door, and I switch on the lights before the silence can become indulgent. Steel brightens. The pass wakes. The cold stations hum. I place my jacket over the back of the office chair, roll my sleeves, and begin the work that has never once asked what I feel before demanding what I know.
I tell myself I’m not jealous. Then I correct the lie because I dislike poor technique, even in my own head. Iamjealous, and Iamsurprised by the violence of it.
I’ve seen beautiful women with other men before. I’ve shared rooms with flirtation, charm, performance, the industry’s casual hunger wrapped in linen, wine, and expensive restraint. Serena is too beautiful, too sharp, too alive in her own body and mind not to have men circling her wherever she goes. Paris. New York. London. Rome. Everywhere. It’s idiotic to imagine she has walked through the world without being wanted. It’s even more idiotic to realize I had allowed some part of myself to behave as though wanting her gave me a claim. It doesn’t.
The knife comes down cleaner than necessary through a bundle of herbs. Julien arrives twenty minutes later and pauses just inside the kitchen.
I don’t look up. “Good morning.”
“Good morning, Chef,” Julien says.
The silence that follows is too intelligent.
I look at him. “No.”
Julien sets down his bag.
“I haven’t said anything.”
“You arrived in the shape of commentary.”
“That sounds like a personal issue.”
“It will become yours if you continue.”
He washes his hands without smiling, which means he is enjoying himself.
“Of course, Chef.”
The day begins. Deliveries come in. I reject parsley, accept the fish, correct Thomas before he ruins the staff meal with enthusiasm, and taste Marc’s sauce twice before telling him it can stand. I am precise. I am present. I am, by all visible measures, exactly where I should be.
Underneath that, I am thinking about a man’s hand on Serena’s arm.
She texts just after lunch.
Serena: Are you at the restaurant this afternoon? I’d like to come by if you have time.
