Truly(60)

She touched the dangling silver strands of her new earring. “I just wondered, I guess … if you really want to be a chef.”

“I can’t spend the rest of my life tending bees and shoveling shit on a rooftop.”

“Can’t you?”

“Not and stay in Manhattan. Not if I have any pride, May.”

She nodded. Her lips tightened.

“What?”

“I didn’t say anything.”

“No, but you want to.”

Her lips moved, but a car passed, and whatever she said, he missed it. “Speak up.”

“I just said, you don’t seem very happy. In the kitchen. I mean, you’re fine in your kitchen at home, but when we were at Figs you seemed … tense. And I thought maybe, you know … maybe you’re not on the right path? Isn’t it stressful, being a chef?”

He laughed. A hollow, evil sound.

“But then, maybe the gardening and the honey isn’t very …”

“Lucrative?”

She nodded.

“No.” No, it wasn’t. But that didn’t matter, because Sandy had bought him off, and he’d taken her money.

Equitable distribution. That’s what his lawyer had said. When you got divorced in New York, you took half of the assets. But the restaurant wasn’t an asset—not really. If they’d shut the place down and sold everything off, they wouldn’t have had enough left to pay back the investment group, which was essentially just Sandy’s family money in four or five different guises anyway. Her personal wealth was locked up in financial instruments that kept it from being marital property. They had next to no savings, and Ben’s share of the restaurant was worthless.

His investment of sweat and blood and the accumulated experience of more than a decade in kitchens all over the world was worth precisely nothing.

But the agreement came in the mail anyway, the contract from her lawyers fat with clauses that all boiled down to one injunction: keep your mouth closed and stay out of my way.

That was the deal. No interviews about Sandy, now or in the future. She was going places, and he was a stain in her past that she wanted to seal and paint over.

Shut up and take the money, Sandy said, in her indirect, genteel way.

And he’d taken it.

His lawyer had increased the price of Ben’s compliance until it got ridiculous, but Ben had been the only one who seemed to understand how ridiculous it was.

He’d wanted to claim something from Sandy that would hurt her, but he’d found after he got his hands on the money that it made him angrier. It left him alone with his own disgraceful behavior and no one to judge what a hash he’d made of his career and his marriage but himself.

Ben could see no way to tell May any of that, and no reason to tell her even if he had the words to make it sound okay.

She was watching him, waiting for him to say something, and what he wanted to say was that she didn’t mean anything to him. That none of this meant anything—not her, not all the methods he found to occupy his time, not the fact that he had to find somewhere to live when he no longer had any sense of purpose or use.

He said nothing, but his eyes had to be burning holes in her face. It couldn’t be comfortable. She would turn away and let him off the hook. Any second.

She lifted her chin. The frown lines in her forehead deepened, and her dairymaid’s eyes narrowed, wheat-stubble lashes drawing closer together. “Do you need to get another job as a chef?”

“No. But I want to.”

“Maybe you could look for something less stressful? Like at a hotel? Or an Italian restaurant. Just to ease your way back in?”

She smiled, tentative and sweet.

He walked away from her.

A hotel kitchen. A fucking hotel kitchen. She had no idea what she was talking about.

He heard her boots on the sidewalk behind him, but he ignored them, determined to get hold of himself before he said another word.

It wasn’t her fault he was so angry. It was visceral, physical. It lived inside him, and he didn’t know where to put it anymore. In the first months after the divorce, he’d welcomed it, but now it made him feel shaky and sick. He’d purge himself of it if he could—but there was no way. He was stuck with it.

Ben reached the subway entrance at the corner and then realized he couldn’t descend. He wouldn’t get on a train and leave her. He couldn’t talk to her. He had no good options.

When he heard her coming up behind him, he whirled around and said, “Back off.”

She did that thing with her eyes and her mouth. That whip crack. “You said I could ask. I’m asking.”

“Hotel kitchens are for hacks.”

“And you’re not a hack.”