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As Rachelle and Eddie walked away from the bonfire, Rachelle snuck a peek back at Darcy. Darcy watched with buggy eyes and waved her hand. She looked worried.
But as Eddie and Rachelle walked along the water, watching the moonlight play along the waves, Rachelle felt more at ease than she had in weeks. Eddie had been on the front lines of The Nantucket Factory TV show. He’d seen how the producers and crew had manipulated every situation.
“Did you see how they made Benny and Paul lifelong enemies?” Eddie was saying. “Paul told this whole backstory where he and Benny were best friends as children before ‘something sinister happened.’” Eddie used air quotes.
“Oh, yeah,” Rachelle remembered, laughing.
“But Benny and Paul are the best of friends, right?” Eddie asked.
“They’ve made up the feud,” Rachelle said. “They’re so pleased that the producers went along with it.”
“It must be fun to work in the kitchen with them.”
“It is! Sometimes. Other times, I don’t think they take anything as seriously as me,” Rachelle said. “Which is okay. I’m the sous. They’re just line cooks.”
“And they didn’t go to culinary school or anything,” Eddie reminded her. “They don’t have dreams as big as yours.”
Rachelle’s heart swelled. She loved that he understood the brevity of her biggest accomplishment. He gazed down at her, smiling in that secretive way of his. How many times had she seen him smile like this to the women he’d broken up with?
But they were different, Rachelle reminded herself. More than that, the TV producers had seen something between her and Eddie. They recognized their chemistry. Didn’t that mean something?
For the next hour, Rachelle and Eddie discussed everything that came into their minds. Rachelle felt witty and happy, her heart opening to the mysticisms of the night. Eddie was even smarter than she’d thought, and his eyes danced as he watched her.
Just when Rachelle imagined herself going home with Eddie (even if that was reckless), she heard her name across the winds. Darcy hovered fifteen feet away, waving.
“Hey, babe! I have to get home,” she said. She had to work tomorrow, Rachelle remembered. They both did.
“I’ll see you at work tomorrow?” Rachelle said softly.
“I’ll be there for the big show.”
Eddie and Rachelle followed Darcy back to the bonfire wordlessly. Party revelers watched them, whispering in one another’s ear, gossiping about whatever brewed between them. Rachelle didn’t care. After saying goodbye to the rest of her friends, she practically floated into Darcy’s car. Aria got in the back seat and wolf-whistled.
“What on earth was that, Rach?” she demanded.
Rachelle leaned her head against the window, swooning.
“That was our girl falling in love,” Darcy said quietly. She started the engine.
Chapter Twelve
Summer 2004
Diana and Ryan entered a state of bliss from which she never wanted to wake. They spent nearly every evening together, drinking wine and talking about their days, before crashing hard and waking up early to buy produce, meat, and cheese at the market. Then they separated to work themselves to the bone at their kitchens, beneath their separate culinary masters, before grabbing another wine and doing it all over again. This was the dream Diana had always wanted. This was everything.
Often, they talked about the future in an abstract sense. They dreamed of restaurants they would open together; they spoke of new culinary techniques they wanted to try out. They dreamed together.
Diana wasn’t sure if there was any reality in the beautiful stories they cultivated. But Ryan’s eyes were filled with light, and the Roman nights were long and dark and balmy, and everything in Diana’s life seemed to be pieces of a puzzle she hadn’t realized were coming together until the last possible second.
And then, at the end of July, everything changed.
Diana and Ryan said goodbye at the market, kissing deliriously on a stone wall before darting away from one another. Diana practically skipped the entire way to Arturo’s kitchen. En route, she tried to meditate, to control her mind and stop her daydreaming. It didn’t always work. Arturo had noticed that Diana wasn’t always fully present, of course. He and Sergio both had. They called their Americans “foolish.” They told them to pay better attention. They reminded them that food was far more important than wasting their time with love.
Sometimes they said this with twinkles in their eye, remembering their own long-ago loves. But other times, they said it as though they weren’t frightened to kick Diana and Ryan from their kitchens—to fend for themselves in the heinous and cut-throat culinary world. Diana reminded herself to stay agile.
Diana reached Arturo’s kitchen to find it in a state of chaos. Arturo wasn't there bright and early for the first time since she’d started working; neither was the restaurant's owner. Nobody had heard from them since yesterday when they’d left midafternoon to “speak to a client.”
Dread echoed from everyone’s faces. Diana’s Italian wasn’t good enough to completely understand what was happening. Not knowing what else to do, she began to prep produce, glancing around at everyone, searching for clues. But everyone was speaking over one another; nobody was giving her time to think.
