“Trading?”
“Investing.” She went quiet again for a second, her thumbs tapping away on her phone, and then she tapped hard, her eyes returning to me with a smile. “A few executives from WeWork were in here last night moping in their beers about the quarterly report they were going to have to release today, and I just made a thousand dollars.”
I stood on the footrest of my stool, craning over the bar to see her phone. “You’re serious.”
“Everybody’s got a dream, right?” she said, tucking her phone into her back pocket.
“And yours is of ‘The Wolf of Wall Street’ variety?”
“Hell no,” she scoffed. “But if I want to run my own restaurant someday, I’ll need more than tip money to get there.”
I squinted at her. “Wait…isn’t that, kind of, insider trading?”
“I mean,I’mnot the one spilling company intel over bourbon.” Gemma smirked. “But if these tech bros are dumb enough to treat Greenleaf like a boardroom, I’m smart enough to listen,” she said. “I come from a long line of waitresses and bartenders. The scrappy blue-collar variety. But I’m going to be the one to break the mold. Open my own place. Maybe something in Ohio, where my folks still live. Something like this place, but slightly less bougie.”
I nodded. It sounded nice, but I wasn’t feeling terribly optimistic for anyone in that moment.
“Now, tell me what we’re drinking before I make you roll napkins as therapy.”
I ordered a Diet Coke and started to color in the details of my last day at Redwood. I didn’t tell Gemma about the affair with Simon. There was every chance I was taking that secret to my grave. And not only because Gemma had just revealed that she was monetizing the disclosures of her customers.
I stuck to a sanitized version of the truth—one where I left Redwood—without opening any fresh wounds. She listened while she worked, refilling glasses, dropping plates, moving with the rhythm of the bar as the lunch crowd filled the restaurant. After a little while, the voices bouncing off the marble bar top and the smell of fryer oil clinging to the air started to settle me. By the time the lunch rush thinned out, the tightness in my chest had loosened by another notch.
“I’m going to have a drink with you,” Gemma said as she finished her side work.
“Don’t take this the wrong way, but why?”
For as many nights as we had spent talking through her shifts, we had only socialized outside of Greenleaf a handful of times, that party at Harlan Nichols’s house being one of them.
“Because everybody needs a friend, Este. Even cynical you,” she shot back without hesitation. “Haven’t you ever been the new kid at school? Felt like you were an outsider?”
“Only my whole life.” I blinked.
“Okay, well, someone was supposed to come sit next to you at the lunch table and offer you half their fruit snacks. Because that’s what good humans do.”
“Good humans?” I faked enunciating the words like I had never heard them before.
“No. Nope!” She waved her hands like she was at her capacity for something—for what, I still couldn’t place. “You might have been raised by savages, but I will not hear of you going through this alone. I’m giving away my dinner shift. You need a real friend.” Then, she gestured to her uniform. “I just can’t sit at the bar in this. Give me a few minutes to change. And I’ll be back to upgrade that Diet Coke to a Clase Azul.”
It was this morsel of kindness—no matter how small it might have seemed to Gemma—that endeared her to me. Years later,when I had boarded up the windows of my old California life, there was a crack in the slats. One made just for her.
She was a friend. True blue. The kind of person who gave without strings.
She didn’t wait for me to argue. She slipped through the kitchen door, leaving me in the hush of Greenleaf’s dining room. The buzz of the lunch rush was gone, replaced with the kind of stillness that makes you notice the scrape of every chair, every cough.
My fingers itched with the instinct to check my phone, hungry for the old chaos of unread emails. But there was nothing waiting in my inbox. Only quiet.
And then the sound of the stool next to me dragging across the floor mercifully broke the silence.
I looked over to find Beau Walker beside me.
“Beau?” I cocked my head to one side.
That easy grin of his slid into place as he met my eyes. It was friendly, familiar, like we’d met here a dozen times before. But we hadn’t. His cologne—something woodsy and expensive—lingered in the air, and before my brain could catch up, my body turned toward him.
“Este,” he said. “Hey, it’s good to see you.”
Is it?
