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Ian’s expression is blank, and he seems to be waiting for me to continue, so I add on a few descriptors. “Owner of Embarcado. He won Top Chef Masters, as well as a bunch of other awards.”
“Ah. So he was one of those celebrity chefs?”
“He hated that phrase. He always said that the food is the star, not the person cooking it.”
“So he taught you to cook.”
My steps slow again, the memories of my father dragging my spirits down. “Taught sounds intentional. It wasn’t. I was just ... always a daddy’s girl. I wanted to be with him every moment he was home. He traveled a lot–for all of those being-not-a-celebrity-chef events. So whenever he was home, I wanted to be with him. That meant being in the kitchen of his restaurant. All the time. When you’re around a kitchen that much, when food is the center of everything you do, you just absorb it. He never taught me to cook, but every conversation we ever had was about food.”
Somehow we’re still dancing, and Ian pulls me closer, wrapping his arms around me in something that’s almost a hug as we sway back and forth.
I rest my head on his chest. It’s all the physical closeness I’ve been craving, but it’s not sexy or sensual. It’s just … comfortable. And comforting.
With my head resting against his chest, I can say things out loud that I’ve never admitted to anyone.
“It doesn’t sound healthy when I say it out loud. And I guess I knew that already, because now I think of all the things we never talked about. Not just the emotional stuff, like whether or not he loved me, but the big stuff, too. The practical things. Like who he wanted to run the restaurant after he died.” I laugh, a bitter, unkind sound that makes me realize we’ve both stopped dancing. “I guess you’re not that only with daddy issues.”
“What happened to the restaurant?” There’s a hesitancy in his voice, like he knows the answer, but also knows I won’t talk about it unless he pushes.
“My dad died unexpectedly. He hadn’t changed his will since he divorced his first wife. My mom got the house and the money in the bank, but everything else went to Blake.”
“Blake?”
“My half-brother. He worked at the restaurant with us. He ran the front of the house and I ran the back of the house.”
“It seems like you should’ve gotten an equal share of the restaurant.”
“Seems like it, doesn’t it? The funny thing is, Blake was never really interested in the restaurant until I started running the back of the house when I was twenty-two. Then he was all over it. Demanded he get a job there, too. And I’m not going to say he didn’t work hard, because he did. I thought we got along. Thought we made a good team.”
“You started running the back of the house at twenty-two? Isn’t that a little young to be running a kitchen?”
I shrug. Trying to make light of it, even though I know how it looked. I didn’t then, but I’ve had a lot of time to think about it since then.
“I guess. Probably people thought my dad gave me too much responsibility. Maybe they resented it.” That’s certainly how they made it sound when things came out in depositions. That I was incompetent. That I hadn’t known how to do my job. Even though the restaurant flourished when Blake and I were working as a team. We made more money, sold more food, won more accolades together than dad ever had on his own. But I guess just enough of the staff resented me to make it seem like it was all Blake’s doing. “I’d been working in the kitchen of that restaurant since I was fourteen. I knew it front and back. I could’ve done any job in the restaurant. So when dad decided to step back from the day to day stuff, it seemed natural that I take over as head chef.”
“Fourteen? Is that a violation of child labor laws?”
“Not in Texas. In a family restaurant, you can officially start working there at fourteen.”
“Does that mean you unofficially worked there younger?”
“No comment.”
“So when your dad died, you’d been working there for over a decade. But your brother got the entire restaurant?”
“Pretty much. I tried to fight him at first.” I laugh, a hard, bitter laugh that I don’t like. “I thought it was just a misunderstanding. Something we could settle in mediation. I was wrong. The irony is that he didn’t even want the restaurant. As soon as I ran out of money and dropped the lawsuit, he sold it. Now there’s an Embarcado in every major tourist town in America.”
Ian mutters a series of curses under his breath that I don’t bother trying to distinguish. There’s nothing he could say that would match the things I’ve said about Blake. About our justice system.
I’m long past blaming Blake. I’ll never forgive him, but I don’t know that I can forgive myself either.
“I was hopelessly naïve, assuming that family meant anything to him. But we grew up together, for fuck’s sake. His own mom was … temperamental. He spent more time with us than he did with her. And it was all just so …” I let my words trail off, trying to put my thoughts together. “So messy. One minute, everything’s fine. I’m going to work, doing the job. I wasn’t thriving financially, but I did okay. The next, I got the call that my dad was in the hospital. My world crashed down around me. My dad was gone. People I’d worked with for a decade—People I thought respected me—turned their backs on me the moment they realized I didn’t get the restaurant. Suddenly I was out of a job and practically unemployable.”
“But you’re a great chef.”
I shrug. “My experience didn’t really count for much because everyone assumed I’d been coasting on my father’s coattails.”
“But you can obviously cook. I’ve eaten more good food in the past six months than I have in the rest of my entire life.”
