Violet turned around. “Ooh! I have a great one from Maya Angelou!” she said.
“Did I ask you for the details?” Ryan said, waving her off. “Use a yellow background!”
Then Ryan turned to me.
“Yellow makes people think of truth,” he said.
Had I read that somewhere? Or was Ryan just so convincing when he spewed his bullshit that I not only believed it, I believed I had always believed it?
I reached for my coffee. “Good to know.”
“I could do without the sarcasm.”
“So fix it, Ryan,” I said. “What if someone starts digging around? The Food Network will pull the plug. Everyone will pull the plug!”
“Not going to happen,” Ryan said.
I looked at him, uncertain.
“We have Meredith saying it’s not true. What kind of digging makes sense after that? Besides, no one wants to open that can of worms. There are two people who have released cookbooks in the last decade who had anything to do with the actual recipes in those books. At the most, you have a celebrity who created the dishes. The recipes are worked out in a
test kitchen by some ghostwriter who actually knows what he’s doing.”
“A ghostwriter who received credit,” I said.
“So you want to tell the world now that Meredith is the ghostwriter? It’s a little late to give her credit.”
I thought of what I wasn’t saying out loud—the stuff that would surely sink our little empire if it got out. “We know it’s not just the recipes,” I said.
“Sunny . . .”
Ryan’s eyes softened, and for a second, it stopped feeling like he was producing me. It felt like he was being my friend.
“We also are the only ones who know. Trust me. We are safe,” he said.
He nodded with absolute conviction.
I felt myself sinking into his assured tone. And it was enough for me to push it aside.
“We good here?” he said.
“We are,” I said, almost meaning it.
It’s amazing, after all, what you’ll ignore when you want something to be right, isn’t it? Like in this case, the truth.
3
If I haven’t made it abundantly clear yet, Ryan had always had something of a loose hold on the truth. One of the first things he told me, in fact, was that he hated the words lies and truth. He said they were needlessly categorical. He liked to say instead: the story.
And the story, as far as the world knew, was a familiar one. It was a story that a lot of women could relate to. I was a small-town girl who, after college, decided to move to New York City. I was young, newly engaged, and struggling to make a name for myself as a journalist. I was working terrible hours at a sports magazine. (We settled on a sports magazine because Ryan thought a woman’s magazine was too clichéd.) The point was, I had moved far from where I’d come from—but instead of feeling great about this, I felt a strange pull toward my roots. So, the Sunday I turned twenty-six, I headed to the farmer’s market in Park Slope and made a family favorite—tomato pie—walking Danny through the various ingredients with stories of growing them on the farm. At some point, Danny picked up the video camera and filmed me putting the pie in the oven—later revealing the decadent finished treat.
We had enjoyed the night so much—far more than the sticky sesame chicken we treated ourselves to on Sunday nights—that the next Sunday, I did the same thing. And the Sunday after that.
And so it started a tradition. Every Sunday night, I cooked a new farm-fresh meal, recipes developed to highlight in-season produce, local farmers. Everything was easy to make (every chef loved promising ease), but also fun: Danny on the other side of the camera, laughing at the embarrassing anecdotes I shared about growing up on the farm, how they related to the recipe, how they related to our life together now. From the first video, I wasn’t just promising a farm-fresh meal: I promised something else. Friendship. Honesty. Someone saying it was okay to embrace wherever you came from as a part of where you wanted to go.
Danny started posting the videos to YouTube to share with our family and friends. He called them, “A Little Bit of Sunshine: Sunday Night with a Farmer’s Daughter.”
He, of course, had no idea they would go viral.