“That sounds inefficient.”
Julien picks up the dairy order sheet and starts toward the main kitchen.
“She is coming at 9:00.”
“She said that to frighten me.”
“Did it work?”
“No.”
“It should.”
We return to the kitchen as the first prep cook arrives through the staff entrance. Thomas appears with damp hair, an overfull backpack, and the careful expression of a young man who knows he has recently been disappointing and would prefer not to repeat the experience.
“Morning, Chef,” Thomas says.
“Morning,” I say. “You’re on bones today.”
His shoulders tighten by half an inch. “Yes, Chef.”
“Color, not clock.”
“Yes, Chef.”
Julien gives him the prep list.
“Set up stock first. Then shell peas. Label everything before it leaves your station.”
“Yes, Chef,” Thomas says to him, then moves quickly toward the sinks.
The rest of the crew begins to arrive in measured increments. Elise from pastry, pale-haired, calm, already annoyed by someone who is not here yet. Marc on sauce, broad-shouldered and quiet until service, when his vocabulary narrows to curses and exact temperatures. Inès for garde-manger, hair wrapped in a scarf, eyes sharp enough to cut herbs by looking at them. One by one, they enter, change, wash, and take their places.
The room fills. The kitchen becomes itself. Knives come out. Boards land on steel. Water runs. The first onions split beneath a blade. Coffee appears in paper cups and disappears before anyone admits needing it. The language shifts between French and English depending on who is swearing, asking, answering, correcting. The morning moves with the fragile order of people who have done this before and know that order is only real if everyone keeps earning it.
I change into my jacket in the office, buttoning it from the bottom up. The fabric sits clean against my shoulders. White, pressed, not yet marked by the day. That will change.
When I step back into the kitchen, Julien is at the pass with my phone in his hand.
I stop.
“Why are you holding that?” I ask.
“It was vibrating on the shelf.”
“That doesn’t answer the question.”
“I thought it might be Claire.”
“So you picked up my phone?”
“I considered answering it.”
“You considered death very early today.”
“It was Claire,” Julien says. “She left another voicemail.”
“Of course she did.”
