Georgia waited wordlessly, dumbfounded. He had never told her this.
“But now,” Michel paused. “I fear you’ve lost your way. I’ve suspected it for some time. I can taste the change in your food. It’s still technically excellent, but it lacks that spark. I cannot taste the life in the food you touch anymore; there is no joy. You are so focused on your goal of making head chef that I fear you have forgotten why you wanted to become a chef in the first place. And if that happens, everything suffers. Your team, your food, your inspiration.” He gazed at her sternly. “You are so talented, Georgia, and so determined. You have so much potential, but if you lose your spark, you will burn out, burn up. Your life will become bitter, without true meaning. You must not let that happen.” He paused a moment. “I have not yet made up my mind about La Lumière Dorée. I am considering you, but I am considering a few others as well.”
“What can I do to make it right?” Georgia asked, feeling both relief and disappointment. He was strongly considering others, chefs who presumably could still taste the food they made. But at least she still had a shot. “Tell me what to do. Give me a chance,” she begged softly, chastened. “I can prove to you I haven’t lost my touch. I just need a little time to get my head on straight, to get over what happened with Etienne and... regain my spark. I can do this. You know I can. No one works harder or longer than I do. No one wants this more. You know that, Michel. Please.”
Carefully Michel set the saucepan aside and wiped up a few drops of spilled sugary syrup. He gazed out the window, over the lush green lawn and budding trees, considering her words. “Perhaps it is not about working harder or longer, mon amie,” hemused. “Perhaps it is simply about asking yourself why you want the things you’ve been striving for, the things you’ve wanted for so long.” He glanced back at her. “I wonder if the answer might surprise you.”
She said nothing, just waited. After a long pause, he nodded, seeming to come to a decision. He picked up a small bowl of pine nuts and scooped up a heaping teaspoonful, sprinkling some on each of the blancmanges. “Very well. This is my advice. Go somewhere for a few weeks. Get out of Paris. Go home to Texas, go to Antarctica, it makes no difference to me. Disappear and let this all blow over. Right now, Etienne has made it his personal mission to make sure no respectable kitchen in Paris will take you on. He wants you blackballed entirely. But his temper will cool and people will forget the gossip. When Dupont’s review is published, it will make a scene for a few days before it is replaced by a new scandal. Paris will forget, as it always does, but this will take some time. You need to disappear. Go somewhere where you can rest, where you can rediscover your own inspiration, where you can be reminded of why you became a chef in the first place. Then when the time is right, come back and prove to me why I should place La Lumière Dorée in your hands. I will give you one more chance, but you will have to prove yourself—how do you Americans say it—fair and square?”
He straightened and wiped his hands on a clean white kitchen towel. Their time was over. She was dismissed. Georgia followed Michel out of the kitchen, reluctant but relieved. Even if the odds were stacked against her currently, at least she still had a chance. She was used to long odds. She’d beaten them before. Now she just had to get out of Paris and regain her spark, whatever that meant. She wondered if he could somehow sense her gradual loss of taste. Was that what he meant by her losingher spark? Regardless, she would do as he said. She would leave Paris and figure out how to regain her sense of taste and her spark somehow. But where in the world could she go?
At the door, Michel cupped her shoulders, leaning in and air-kissing her on both cheeks. “Au revoir, mon amie,” he said.
He smelled delicious, like rosemary and chocolate and buttery crumbs fresh from the oven. She sniffed him discreetly as she returned the air-kisses. Her sense of smell was as keen as ever. It just didn’t seem to translate to her tongue.
“Merci, Michel.”
He drew back, and she caught a glimmer of amusement in his eyes. “Did you really shut Etienne and that pastry chef in the walk-in refrigerator?” he asked, his mouth twitching up at one corner.
She closed her eyes, feeling the humiliation afresh. “Yes, I did. And then I left them there,” she admitted.
“You are not a woman to be trifled with,” Michel said, his tone dry. “Good for you. Now go, and come back when you have discovered afresh your special spark in the kitchen.”
6
An hour later,Georgia paced the gravel walkways under the graceful chestnut trees of the Jardin du Luxembourg. A few pedestrians wandered along nearby paths, exercising dogs or talking on their phones, but thankfully, she was alone. The breeze was still quite chilly in early April, though it smelled fresh and green, like new leaves and wet earth. She shivered and pulled the trench coat she’d borrowed from Phoebe more snugly around her.
Where could she go to get out of Paris? That was the most pressing question. Phoebe was at work, so Georgia had to try to puzzle things out by herself for a few more hours. She wound her way through the garden, considering her options. They were scanty.
“What would you do if you were me, Julia?” Georgia whispered an entreaty.
She tried to envision her tall, cheerful patron saint. What would Julia advise? She could always go back to Texas. The thought felt deflating. Georgia would always have a place on the ranch. Her father and Aunt Hannah would never turn her away, she knew that. But the knowledge was cold comfort. There was nothing for her there, no inspiration, no one who understood why she’d made the choices she had.
She’d been an only child, raised on the ranch and expected to marry a fellow rancher’s son and spend her life birthing andrearing a new generation of ranchers to carry on the family legacy. It was a hard life but satisfying to those who embraced it—but it was a life she had never wanted. From an early age she had longed for something else, and she’d bolted from under her family’s heavy mantle of legacy and expectations the first chance she got. The week she turned eighteen, she’d left the ranch and never looked back. Her choice to veer so drastically from the path they thought best was a constant source of disappointment to her father and aunt, a sore spot that never seemed to heal between her and her family. She had not been home in years. To go back now with her tail between her legs, trying to find her way again in a place that did not embrace who she was, felt nearly impossible. No, Texas was out of the question.
Georgia imagined Julia standing in her famous television kitchen, nodding approvingly as she massaged a chicken with butter in preparation for roasting it.
“Illegitimi non carborundum” Julia trilled as she poked a slice of lemon into the bird’s body cavity. “That’s Latin for ‘Don’t let the bastards get you down.’ ”
“So what other choices do I have?” Georgia asked. Julia neatly trussed the chicken and offered no further advice. Georgia blew out a little puff of air in frustration and paused by an empty bench near the edge of the park. She clicked on her phone, ignoring the dozens of texts from acquaintances who had no doubt read or heard the gossip and were eager for more details. The texts had been coming in since before she woke that morning, but she was choosing not to look at them. She didn’t want to add fuel to the fire of scandal. Best to let the drama die down on its own as quickly as possible. What she needed now was a way out of Paris.
Georgia briefly checked her social media accounts, hopingfor inspiration. Big mistake. Apparently, she had some haters out there, and shutting Paris’s sexiest chef in a walk-in refrigerator had enraged them. She was being called any number of unflattering things in French AND English. She quickly swiped out of Instagram, cheeks flaming at the vitriol, and navigated to her email instead. It seemed like safer terrain. Maybe there would be someone in her contact list that could help?
Georgia scrolled through her unread messages, mostly advertisements and junk. She often didn’t check her email more than once or twice a week as there was seldom anything pressing in her inbox. It had been almost a week this time, and now there were dozens of new emails waiting. She scrolled through hurriedly, erasing as she went. She almost deleted the email message sandwiched between an EasyJet airfare sale and a payment reminder from her cell phone provider, but then her eye caught the name of the sender and she stopped cold. For a long moment, she stared at it in disbelief. It couldn’t be. It had been sent five days ago. The subject line said simply, “Please read.”
Georgia’s heart skipped a beat, and her hand went instinctively to her charm, fingers clenched around the smooth, worn leaves. In an instant, she was five years old, standing in the dusty driveway back at the ranch in West Texas, the August afternoon sun blazing hot on the crown of her head, feeling the slip of the chain as it was clasped around her neck, the coolness of her mother’s guitar string–calloused fingers caressing her cheek briefly. Her mother’s voice, warm and rough as the gravel beneath her bare feet.
“You hold on to this necklace, Georgia May. Keep it till you see me coming for you. This is the recipe for a charmed life right here in these four leaves, see? Faith, hope, love, and luck. I wish all of those for you, sweet girl.” And then her mother had left. She had never come back.
Heart pounding, Georgia clicked on the message.
Dear Georgia May,
My name is Star Stevens and I am your mama. I’m sorry to be writing like this out of the blue, but there is something I need to tell you, something that could change your life. I don’t know what you’ve been told about me since you were little, but please know I never stopped loving you.
If you want to know the truth about yourself and our family, then come to San Juan Island. I hope you’ll give me a chance to explain.
Love,
