But I’m smiling, grinning like an entire fool, after twelve hours of filming.
Because today we made tourtière—my grandmother's recipe, the one she brought from Quebec and guarded like a nuclear code.
Flaky crust. Spiced pork filling.
A comfort food that tastes like childhood and snow days and belonging.
And for the first time since I started making food content, I got to tell that story on camera. The whole story.
Not the sanitized, thirty-second version that came with my food vlog on social media, but the real one—about my Mémère, about Sunday dinners in Montreal, about food as a love language.
The extra budget Victor approved means I can do this now.
Real stories. Vulnerable content.
The show my ex-husband said wasn’t possible to make. The show my ex-husband Thomas Whitfield—a media consultant I met working on a TV show when I was twenty-six and he was thirty-six—said would lack “brand appeal.”
I spent years shaving off pieces of myself to fit into his curated life—white subway tile kitchen, beige furniture, artisanal everything, conversations whispered so as not to disturb the male creative genius in the room.
And now? Now I’m allowed to be messy again. Sentimental again. Real again.
Thanks to a fake marriage with my billionaire boss.
Which is why I might, genuinely, be in trouble.
"Harper?" My production assistant, Kyle, appears beside me. "We're all wrapped. You good?"
“Yeah,” I say, wiping flour off my face with the apron I stole—borrowed—from Babushka. “Just making notes.”
I jot down a line in my leather-bound recipe journal, the one thing I never let Thomas touch. I tuck it under my arm just as Rachel Stone appears in the doorway.
“Harper.”
“Miss Stone.”
“You look… happy,” she says, like it’s a medical anomaly, and I pretend not to hear the implication.
But she’s not wrong. I kinda am.
The life I lead now is different from the one I cultivated back in Brooklyn.
Brooklyn Harper had:
- A wobbly IKEA dresser
- A roommate who filmed TikToks at 2 AM
- A kitchen sink that groaned like it was haunted
- Three square feet of counter space
- And exactly ZERO human beings who made her coffee unless they were paid to do it
Manhattan Harper is decidedly much cleaner…which might have something to do with my boss—and new roommate and temporary husband, Victor Kade.
Manhattan Harper is decidedly much cleaner…which might have something to do with my boss—and new roommate and temporary husband, Victor Kade.
Because billionaire CEO Victor Kade at home is nothing like the frowning tyrant I know in the office. Not even a little bit.
