Page 155 of Neap & Spring

I can’t breathe.

The edges of my vision are going dark. The kitchen is too loud and too hot, and I can’t get enough air. My chest feels like someone’s standing on it. I need to leave, I need to get out, but I can’t move, my feet are rooted to the floor.

“Vivienne.” Derek’s voice echoes from somewhere to my left. “You need to step off the line.”

I try to answer but nothing comes out.

“Now, Vivienne.”

My legs move. I don’t tell them to. I can’t even feel them, but thankfully they move. One step, then another, then I’m walking toward the back door, past the dish pit and the prep cooks who won’t look at me.

I push through the door, and the cold November air hits me, and I make it exactly three steps into the alley before I double over, hands on my knees, gasping.

I can’t breathe.

I try to pull air in, but it won’t come. It catches in my throat and turns into a sob, and suddenly I’m crying. My whole body convulses and I can’t stop it.

I sink down against the wall, my chef’s whites getting dirty from the alley, and I cry until there’s nothing left.

It takes a long time.

My apartment is four subway stops away. I don’t remember the ride.

I sit on my bed in my chef’s whites without turning on the light. The city noise comes through the window — sirens, car horns, shouting. I sit in the sounds, and I think about Paris. The night of the distinction ceremony and the weight of the award in my hands. That feeling that flooded my system like a door opening onto something enormous. Walking on a bridge over the Seine at two in the morning with Callum, both of us still in our dress clothes, neither of us wanting the night to end.

How our night did end.

My phone is in my hand, and his name is on the screen. I have a missed call from him and two new texts asking how the event is going. I opened the thread on the subway without knowing I was doing it, the pure reflex of years moving my fingers without thought. When something happens, Callum. That’s the whole equation.

When something happens, Callum will fix it.

I scroll up through the unread messages. There are forty-one of them. I’ve been going quiet for weeks, and he’s been filling the space between the way he always has, steadily and without pressure. Simple messages in the way you leave a light on for someone so they can find their way around in the dark.

how’s the sauce station

made the most insane halibut today, you would have lost your mind

okay hear me out on the new floor plan

vivi you okay? haven’t heard from you in a few days

no pressure, just checking in

new floor plan attached. the bar is longer.

I open the floor plan. It’s a photo of a hand-drawn sketch, a sauce stain at the corner, covered in his handwriting. There’s a table by the window on the west wall with an arrow pointing to it and a note: good vibes corner, still here, don’t worry. Below that, in smaller writing: this is where you’ll sit when you come to visit.

I look at that for a long time.

He’s working doubles to save for this. He’s mapping floor plans on his days off, and he’s still texting to check in on me when I go quiet. But he has everything ahead of him. A dream of opening a restaurant. A town he adores. His family. This life he’s been building toward since before he even met me. He has so much ahead of him, and he is so completely, entirely confident in himself. And so am I. I know he’ll do it, that he’ll open the most beautiful restaurant, and that he’ll be happy cooking there. But I also know — with the specific certainty of knowing someone well enough to finish their sentences — exactly what he would do if I called him right now.

He would get on the next plane out.

He would come here and he would find Stellan Voss and he would do something that cannot be undone, and it would cost him everything. His reputation. The restaurant fund. He would do it without hesitating for a single second because that is exactly who he is, and I love him for it.

I have loved him for it since the first day in Paris when I watched him stand up for a classmate in front of a chef twice his age without even thinking about it, and I cannot let it happen.

I cannot let him burn everything down for me.