“Don’t be. Just keep your eyes on me, pretend the cameras are furniture, and if you lose your train of thought, I’ll catch it.” She winks. “I’ve been doing this long enough to make anyone sound brilliant.”
A man with a clipboard holds up three fingers. Then two. Then one.
The red light blinks on.
“Good morning, Mistberry Cove! And welcome back. This morning I have a very special guest. She’s a local, a trained chef, and this Omega has published her debut cookbook,Salt and Comfort: Recipes for Quiet Nights, which, I can tell you personally, has the most incredible clam chowder recipe I have ever made in my own kitchen. Please welcome Claire Darling.”
I smile, which feels stapled on. My hands are clasped in my lap because if I let them go, they’ll shake and the camera will pick it up. The lights are brighter than I thought they’d be, bleaching out the edges of the room, and I can feel a bead of sweat forming at the base of my spine.
“Thanks for having me, Veronica.” My voice holds. I can do this.
“So, Claire. Tell us about this beautiful book. Where did these recipes come from?”
This one I’ve practiced. “My grandmother, mostly. She ran a little bed-and-breakfast on the coast, and she cooked entirely by instinct. No measuring cups, no timers. She’d taste and adjust and taste again until it was right. When she passed, she left me a binder of handwritten recipes, and I spent the last few years updating them with my own twists. Modern techniques, seasonal ingredients. But the heart of it is still hers.”
Veronica nods warmly. “And you trained professionally, is that right?”
“Culinary school in Seattle, then I worked the line at a couple of restaurants before realizing I preferred writing about food to cooking under pressure.” I pause, noting that I’ve been picking at the seam of my pants under the desk, and stop. “There’s a different kind of creativity in it. You get to slow down. Think about why a dish matters, not just how to get it to the pass in ninety seconds.”
This is going well. Veronica’s nodding, the red light is steady, and Katie is giving me the thumbs-up from near the cameraman. Nobody’s making a face that suggests I’m embarrassing myself. My pulse is still too fast, but the words are coming and they almost sound like they belong to a person who knows what she’s doing.
“Now,” Veronica says, leaning forward with a smile that tells me this is the fun part of her script, “I have to ask. Your book is all about home cooking and comfort food, and I love that. But these days, everybody’s a food expert, aren’t they? You’ve got influencers, bloggers, people making incredible content online. How do you feel about that world? Is there room for everyone at the table?”
It’s a soft question. On a normal day, the answer is easy. Something warm and generous about how food is a universallanguage and every kitchen has a story worth telling. I’ve rehearsed a version of this. I know the words.
But my brain is not in this chair. It’s suddenly standing in the living room, watching Louis slide my ring into his pocket without a glance.I can’t keep pretending.The wordpretendingis lodged behind my eyes, pulsing in time with my heartbeat, and Veronica’s question sits wrong in my scrambled head. I hear it as a challenge. As a comparison. As someone asking me to justify my existence when I’ve just been told by the person closest to me that I’m not enough.
“I-I think there’s a difference between someone who has actually trained and put in the work in real kitchens and someone who just films themselves making pasta in nice lighting.” I swallow. My mouth is dry. “It’s not really the same thing, is it?”
My answer is finally out, and I exhale.
Veronica laughs, light and professional, and pivots to the next question. Something about favorite ingredients. Seasonal produce. I answer on autopilot, my mouth forming sentences my brain has already abandoned, because a small, cold part of me has registered what I just said and is replaying it on a loop.It’s not really the same thing, is it?Said with a tight jaw, an edge I didn’t intend, and a tone that, stripped of context, sounds exactly how a snob sounds when she believes she’s better than everyone in the room. God, why did I say that?
The rest of the interview passes in a blur of nodding and smiling and speaking in sentences I won’t remember. When the red light finally clicks off, I exhale so hard my whole body deflates.
“You did wonderfully,” Veronica says, standing, and then adds with a little tilt of her head, “though you might get a few comments about the blogger bit. People are touchy about that world.” She pats my arm. “I’m sure it’ll be fine.”
I don’t fully register the warning. Katie’s already crossing the studio floor, heels clicking, face bright.
“You survived!” She unclips my microphone and pulls me into a hug. “See? Not so bad.”
“Why did I suck that much?”
“You were charming and genuine, and your nana would’ve been proud.” She holds me at arm’s length, studying my face with the specific intensity of a best friend checking for cracks. “Now. Let me see where we can push the promo on this, get some clips circulating. We’ll grab brunch and talk through the next steps, and I promise you, this is going to be good.” She squeezes my shoulders. “You’re extraordinary, Claire. And that man is going to spend the rest of his life eating microwave meals and regretting every stupid thing he did.”
I let her lead me out of the studio and into the morning, where the fog has nearly burned off, the town is waking up, and everything feels fragile and sharp and one breath away from shattering.
Katie takes me to brunch at the little café near the waterfront, the one with mismatched mugs and cinnamon sugar dusted over everything, and for a while, I almost believe her when she says I’m going to be okay. She tells me Louis is an idiot and talks so fiercely about fresh starts that I let myself nod along. For one hour, with coffee warming my hands and Katie filling every silence before I can fall into it, the world feels survivable. Then I go home, unlock the door, and reality is waiting for me on the other side.
That evening, I’m sitting on the floor of the living room surrounded by the ghosts of a relationship I thought was real. His running shoes are still under the coffee table. Two of his hoodies are draped over the dining chair. A pair of expensive headphones on the kitchen counter. Little pieces ofhim scattered through the apartment, left behind not because he forgot but because they weren’t worth taking.
I’m in sweats and an old T-shirt, and I haven’t eaten since brunch. I still feel nauseous whenever I think about the car pulling away and the way he laughed at whatever the brunette said as they drove off. We never bonded, no biting or permanent mark.
My phone buzzes.
Louis, and every inch of me freezes.
I’ll come by tomorrow to pick up the rest of my stuff. If you could box it up, that’d be great. Thanks, doll.
