“I went once,” she said. “Forty-eight hours when I was twenty-two on a layover I extended on purpose. I ate three meals. I cried at the second one and then I came home and didn’t let myself think about it for a decade. So, Paris.”
“You’ll go.”
“Will I?”
“You said you were going to build a catering company without resources or connections, and you did. If you say you’re going to Paris, you’ll do it.”
She drank her coffee. There were a hundred reasons she hadn’t gone yet, and none of them belonged in a Thursday-morning coffee shop.
“You said a few minutes,” Gabriel said. “I don’t want to monopolize your morning.”
“It’s only a problem if I object.” She set her cup down. “And I was finishing up before you walked in, so it’s not a problem.”
“In that case, tell me a story.”
“What kind?”
“Tell me about your first year in the business.”
She thought about it for a beat. “The first month of Thorne Events, I catered a fortieth birthday party in a Brooklyn brownstone for a client who had three cats. I’m not a woman who knew, in that period of my life, to ask a client about cats. I had a tray of crab cakes resting on a sideboard while I went back to the kitchen. I came back, and the tray was gone. Vanished. Like the rapture had taken it. The largest of the three cats, a Norwegian Forest cat the size of a beagle, had relocated all twelve crab cakes one at a time into the master bedroom and arranged them on the bed.”
Gabriel set his coffee down and leaned forward. “Did the guests get crab cakes?”
“They didn’t. I told the client her cats had excellent taste, and I replaced the crab cakes with a scallop crudo I invented in fifteen minutes from what was in the fridge. She told everyone the scallop was the best thing she’d ever eaten. I worked the rest of service on autopilot, smiled at every guest like my face had been wired in place, and didn’t say a full sentence to my own team until I was loading the van at midnight. The client tipped me forty percent.”
He was laughing. She hadn’t realized how much she’d missed that sound.
“My grandmother taught me to feed people through any disaster. She used to say if you can’t feed someone, you can at least sit with them. I’ve been over-correcting on the first half of that sentence ever since.”
“I’d like to meet her.”
“She’s been gone seven years.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Me too. She left me her cookbook. There are notes in the margins in red pen where she corrected the original author. Ikeep it propped open on my counter like she’s still telling me what to do.”
He was looking at her again the way he had at the wedding, only this time she didn’t feel exposed by it. Her hand tightened on her coffee cup. That was worse.
“I have to go,” she said.
“I know.”
He stood and picked up his coffee. He hadn’t finished it. Neither had she.
“Thursday mornings,” he said. “Is this a regular thing?”
“Five years running.”
“Good to know.”
He walked toward the door, then stopped and turned back.
“The Norwegian Forest cat,” he said. “What was its name?”
“Buttercup.”
“I’ll keep that in mind.” He paused, one hand on the doorframe, and looked at her with an expression she couldn’t quite read. “When it comes to you, I seem to remember everything.”
