Hello, Sunshine

After all, how often do you meet your opposite self? Hadn’t Chef Z been mine? Here was a man completely uninterested in the very things I had pursued—stardom, commercial success, the praise of others. He had given them away a long time ago. And even though they had found their way to him again, he seemed to give them the amount of time they deserved.

Very little.

There was a lesson in that, which Z had taught me, about what we should pay attention to instead. About taking a hard look at what we are willing to throw away, about what we should be letting it show us.

There was also a lesson in unmitigated honesty.

“Please get out of my face!” he said when I found him in the wine cellar.

And how we should temper it.

I almost turned around and gave Lottie my notice instead. She also wouldn’t have particularly cared, but she was a lot less scary.

But after I didn’t run away, Z see

med mildly interested in what I wanted. “Speak, already,” he said.

“I’m moving to New York,” I said.

He sighed, not turning from his bottle search. “I thought you wanted a promotion.”

“You said no. Plus, I’m having a baby. And the father is in New York. And I hate it here. I mean, not here at the restaurant. Here in the Hamptons, though.”

He shot me a look, like I had stepped on his face. “That was a longer answer than I was looking for.”

“I don’t have a job there,” I said. “And I could use one.”

“Could you?”

“If you know of anything.”

“If I know of anything?”

It was a crazy thing to ask him for, and I knew it. And he knew it. But I didn’t actually expect his help. I just thought it would give him an opportunity to say good-bye in his own Chef Z way.

And it did.

Chef Z smiled, like he was going to say he was going to help, like he was going to say he knew a guy, like he was going to say I’d become indispensable to him.

“The radishes are shit tonight,” he said.

I smiled. “Is that right?”

He nodded. “Take a bucket of them. And go.”

55

The morning I left for New York—to find an apartment, to begin the process of starting again—I found Ethan at the end of the driveway, getting out of his car.

He had been avoiding spending too much time with me, so I was surprised when I walked outside, bag in hand, and saw him walking toward the guesthouse.

“Don’t get excited,” he said. “I’m just going to see my friend.”

“Are you?”

He shrugged. “Depends how this goes,” he said.

I motioned toward the top step, and he motioned toward the bottom one.