“Babies are a handful,” Maggie said, with the unshakable certainty of a woman who had seen it all. “Teething can be fixed with a little whiskey on the gums. Works like a charm.”
Jonah stared at her. “I’m sorry, what?”
“Oh, just a drop!” Jo Ellen chimed in. “Tessa loved it.”
“That explains a lot,” he cracked. “Could we skip the whiskey?”
“Yes, but you have to promise me to relax, Jonah,” Maggie said. “We’ve got this covered and then some.”
Jonah ran a hand through his hair, considering his paltry options. Bring Atlas to school? Skip Chef Broussard’s class? Or…
“Okay. I’ll get him and bring what he needs. There are some instructions, though. He takes at least six ounces every three hours, sometimes more if he’s hungry. Which you’ll know because he’ll?—”
“Cry,” Maggie finished. “Jonah, go get him.”
“But he likes to be held upright after he eats or he’ll spit up. And if he gets really worked up, he likes white noise?—”
“Well, today he’ll like Maggie noise. Go. Off with you. I nursed your father through colic, two ear infections, and a case of the croup so bad the pediatrician made a house call at midnight. I think I can manage one morning.”
Actually, one whole day if he went to lab. No, that he could skip. “I’ll be back around one, latest.”
“By then, Atlas will know how to walk and play Wordle,” Jo Ellen joked.
He tore back downstairs, started loading up like a pack mule, made three trips, fired off forty instructions that were either ignored or mocked, handed over a cranky baby, then thanked them profusely.
Sweating like the proverbial pig, he climbed into the beater Honda he’d bought a few months ago—a car that made his old van look like a luxury vehicle—and pulled out of the driveway with eighteen minutes to make the twenty-minute drive to Niceville.
Jonah Lawson pressed the gas and hoped traffic was light and Broussard was late. Of course, neither of those things would happen.
The lecture hallat Northwest Florida State College smelled like industrial cleaner and old coffee, which was a cruelcombination for culinary students who’d been promised they were entering a world of elevated flavor.
Somehow, with the help of a miracle and a few forgiving yellow lights, Jonah made it with two minutes to spare, sliding into a seat in the third row just as Chef Marcel Broussard walked in.
Broussard was fifty-four, lean and clean-cut except for a salt-and-pepper mustache that he maintained with the same precision he applied to his béarnaise. He’d spent twenty years in restaurant kitchens—New Orleans, Charleston, and a stint in Lyon—before a blown-out knee and what he once described as “a profound disenchantment with the dining public” brought him to teaching.
He wore his chef’s whites like a military uniform, pressed and immaculate, and he spoke with the unhurried Cajun cadence of someone from deep in the bayou who’d seen every mistake a student could make and had zero patience for repeating himself.
He was, by any measure, terrifying.
He was also the reason Jonah got up every morning and believed this career was possible.
“Today,” Broussard began, immediately silencing the room, “we are going to talk about heat. Not temperature. Heat.” He looked around slowly. “If you think those are the same thing, you are behind.”
As he lectured, Jonah forgot about Atlas’s rough night, the grannies,Mr. Toad’s Wild Rideon the way to class, and the fact that his pullover still smelled faintly of spit-up and…other things.
Broussard took them through conduction, convection, and radiant heat, weaving in stories from his years on the line, like the time he’d watched a cook destroy a two-hundred-dollar cut of Wagyu by panicking at the sear.
“Your hands will lie to you,” Broussard said, pointing at a student in the front row who flinched. “Your thermometer will give you a number. But the food will tell you the truth, if you have the discipline to pay attention.”
Jonah typed into his laptop with such fury that his fingers hurt, attempting to record every word, one thought in the back of his mind:This. This is why I’m here.
When the lecture ended, students shuffled out, buzzing about the afternoon lab session. Jonah hung back, pulling out his phone to check for texts from the grannies.
Nothing. No news was good news, right? He’d check in now, and if Atlas was holding steady, he’d stay for lab.
As he composed the text, Broussard’s voice cut through the noise of departing students.
“Lawson. A minute.”
