At the motel, she set up on the kitchenette counter: salt, sugar, smoked paprika, garlic powder, cayenne, ground black pepper, a dried bay leaf crumbled fine. She mixed the brine in a stockpot—two parts buttermilk, one part cold water—the seasoning blooming on the surface. She broke down each bird at the joint with a single clean motion, the way her grandmother had shown her at twelve years old. She slid the pieces into the brine. She put the pot in the bathtub on ice.
Then she sat on the edge of the bed and counted her savings: $21,412. If she lost on Saturday, the $100,000 penalty would take everything she had and leave her almost $80,000 in the hole. There was no version of the next decade that would survive that number.
She opened her mother's notebook. The page she turned to was a fried chicken recipe in her mother's handwriting, pencil now nearly gray, the ink long since gone. At the bottom of the page, in her mother's slow, careful script, was a sentence she had not let herself read in six years:
Don't cook for the table, cook for the ones who never got fed.
She closed the notebook. A single tear hit the leather cover. She wiped it away with her thumb. Her thumb was steady.
A knock at the door. Tony, with two cups of motel coffee and a face Brianna had seen on him only once before—the night she hired him.
"B, I've been watching the clip again. He's got twenty-two years cooking. He's got a TV show. He's got five sous chefs. He's got a fryer setup that cost more than your truck."
"I know."
"You ever been on TV?"
"No."
"Then—"
She held the coffee in both hands, looked at him. "Tony, my mother told me something once: The grill does not care who you are. The grill cares whether you mean it."
"B—"