AllFreeNovel
Share Us
This porch haunts me where I stand as if the ghosts surrounding this property are taking up residence in a body that dispelled them four years ago. Fishing the key out of my pocket, the one I removed from my ring years ago with no intention of ever using it again, I shakily try to push it into the lock.
But something holds me back. If I go in there, in the dark, on a night when I’m supposed to be celebrating my future instead of being whacked in the face with the past, it’ll shatter something inside me. It’ll dismantle this wall I’ve built up, a tolerance to my awful childhood that has allowed me to move through life without being completely paralyzed by the memories.
No. I can’t do this. Not tonight. Maybe not ever.
So, I turn right around and get back in the driver’s seat before I can talk myself back up those porch stairs. The short ride through Hope Crest only serves to whip up more memories I’d rather keep buried.
When I look up, as if I was transported here and didn’t drive myself, I’m parked in the back alley of the only place I’ve ever considered a home.
This building is the only place I ever felt truly safe as a child and then as a teenage girl. Hope Pizza is the one location in this small town where people didn’t openly whisper about me or pity me for being the child of a mad woman. The Ashton family would have never allowed that.
Leona Ashton, the woman whose family has owned this pizzeria for generations, slipped me a permanent key to the building right before I left for New York City. Just in case I ever needed to use it.
Perhaps she knew this day would come at some point.
By the time I grab a small duffel with a few overnight items, lock up my car, and make my way inside, my heart rate has returned to normal. The first thing I notice is the smell of spicy tomato sauce and leavened dough, and it’s a balm to my soul.
My footsteps are the only noise in the quiet of this cozy restaurant, and as I walk into Warren’s, my mentor, office, I’m comforted beyond any comfort I’ve encountered in the last four years. The manager of Hope Pizza is one of the closest people in the world to me, a father figure, and I spent many nights on the couch in his office when I didn’t want to go home.
He won’t mind if I use it one more time.
Exhaustion seems to overtake me as I slump onto the worn leather cushions, and before I know it, sleep is pulling me down.
2
EVAN
White truffle and garlic.
Shrimp sautéed and then seared ever so lightly.
The zest of a lemon rind to finish it off.
Waking with the scent of my dream dish still stinging my nose, I pick up my trusty notebook that I always take to bed with me. The life of a chef, am I right?
I never know when inspiration will strike, although most times for me, it’s at three in the morning and drags me out of sleep like a foghorn. Sleep still clouds my vision as I pick up the pencil, scratching words over the page in measurements and specific ingredients. While some people dream about romance, sex, death, or whacky scenarios, I dream in food: recipes, desserts, savory appetizers, petit-fours, gastronomy, and everything in between. I dream about knife skills and the crackle of hot oil in a pan. I dream about the only thing I’ve ever been passionate enough about to commit my life to, much to my grandmother and mother’s dismay.
But alas, being a chef has always been the only thing I’ve wanted to occupy my life with. It’s what one of the Ashton children was destined for, being the fourth-generation heirs of our famous East Coast pizzeria. Since the cooking bug didn’t bite my two older brothers, Liam and Patrick, or my older sister, Alana, it seems that the buck stopped with me.
My father was the sole chef and menu creator throughout my childhood, from well before I was born all the way until the day I left for culinary school. The plan had always been for me to return, the prodigal youngest son, to take over the family’s kitchen, and thus, the reins would be handed down.
Except I hadn’t stuck to the plan. Instead of returning home straightaway, I took a few years to work my way up in the elite culinary world. High-end restaurants, Michelin stars, modern cooking with gastronomy, and twelve-course menus. Those were the things I wanted to chase after the competitive high of culinary school, and I took off to achieve greatness.
I probably wouldn’t have left were it not for the constant badgering and pressure from my family members about coming to take my rightful throne at Hope Pizza, our family establishment. Feeling guilty, burnt out from the fast lifestyle of a city chef, and yearning for something else, I came back to Hope Crest, my hometown. Even though I never really felt like I fit here in the first place.
My three older siblings are all town royalty here, popular kids who went out for sports, made the homecoming court, or proposed to their partners in the town square where everyone could cheer for them. They were cut from the Delaware River and small-town Pennsylvania the minute they arrived in this world, and I just wasn’t. I always felt awkward in this town, like the one Ashton sibling who can’t relate to what it means to be a part of my family. My school days weren’t spent on the sports field or with friends; I mostly kept to myself, read a lot, and spent a lot of time in the kitchen with my nonna and nonno before he passed.
Giving up an existence where I was regarded as the main character for the first time in my life, as an up-and-coming chef who’d been awarded some pretty high honors, was not an easy thing to do. But here I am, back in Hope Crest, trying my hardest to turn an institution stuck in the past into my own thing.
And waking up from cooking dreams at three a.m. and then working the recipes out in my kitchen on the town’s main drag is part of that journey.
Dressing quietly so as not to wake the other members sleeping in the large white colonial I call my childhood home, I grab the necessities and open my bedroom door.
My feet hit the top stair as I’m about to descend, but a loud thump stops me. My heart lodges in my chest, the noise out of place for so early in the morning. A chill shivers down my spine, one that tells me something is amiss.
And then it comes again, a knock on the wall next to my head that seems forceful enough to break through.
“Mm, Thomas …” I hear Mom say this in a breathy voice, and I nearly jump out of my skin.
