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“Yes, sir!” I jump up and down.
Get under control, Natalie. Show some French class for heaven’s sake.
“Right away, I’ll bring it right away.”
Mr. Bouvier chuckles at the sight of my glee. I’ll get him that bottle of wine, I sure will, but first, I’ve got to tell Olivier. He’s going to be over the moon.
I turn quickly, and my fingertips graze something cold and smooth.
No.
It can’t be.
I only gently touched one of the glasses at the bottom of the tower of crystal, barely anything at all…
The tower shudders. Right in front of me.
If only I can stop it. If only I can stabilize the stem of the glass I touched. If only it doesn’t tip. Come on, Destiny, give me a break…
Oh, no.
A hundred and fifty crystal wine glasses implode like a high rise being demolished. The sound of stemware shattering on the tile floor echoes across the restaurant.
And I’m standing in the middle of it, with a single empty glass in my hand.
Lord, help a Texan girl.
CHAPTER 11
Olivier
I hardly slept, the success of last night reverberating throughout my body into the early morning hours. Social media posts and pages of newspapers scattered across the table in the private dining room have only accolades, compliments, and praise for the Bouchon Noir. I couldn't have planned it any better than it went.
Especially with Natalie’s travesty-turned-publicity phenomenon, now dubbed in the papers as “Cassageddon” in French and “Smashageddon” in English.
Certainly I was horrified at the sight and sound of crystal smashing to the ground, but not because of the spectacle. It was because Natalie was standing in the middle of it. I was terrified that she was going to be cut in a thousand places. In my mind, I was already whisking her away, conducting mouth-to-mouth. But she was fine.
There she stood in the middle of shards of sparkling crystal, like a siren in a sea of diamonds. She held one glass in her hand and was frozen like a statue. And then she curtsied. That image became the sensation across tabloids and industry publications alike, the story surrounded by compliments for Natalie whose light-hearted bow and laughter broke the tension in the wake of the leaning tower of crystal.
Everyone felt relief that the American girl was not hurt. Where it mattered most—in those publications that decide the future for theBouchon Noir—critics raved about the quality of the wine and the variety of flavors in the food. General consensus was that the Bouchon Noir just might be back on the right track. The cost of the broken crystal is not negligible, but the value of the publicity it brought is priceless.
I will never forget that sight though, of Natalie and her single wine glass as the entire restaurant was held fixed, all time suspended.
She looked so delicate, a rose in a crystal storm.
The ring of my phone yanks me out of the memory and throws me back into the present moment. We are closed for the day to conduct a thorough cleanup, and I need to debrief with the staff.
We have found great momentum, and we cannot let go. I need them to be motivated. I need them to feel how we are walking a precipice, that this moment is the one that could define us from now on.
My phone continues to ring, father's number on the screen.He’s still in Italy for his annual tasting, to see how the Italians compare to our varieties and—though he’d never say it—to learn a thing or two to bring home and try in the estates.
"Well done, Olivier," he says before I can even say hello.
"Thank you, Papa. It was the whole team."
"Bien sûr, it was the whole team. But it was also you, and it was that American girl," he says with a wide grin on his face. "I'm guessing that was unplanned, since you know I would never approve of smashing that much crystal in the restaurant for the sake of a risky publicity stunt."
"No, Papa, it wasn't planned. But it worked, because it was her. Had it been one of the French servers, you know the journalists wouldn't have latched on the way that they did. Leave it to the Americans."
