Delia’s voice was small but clear. “It wasn’t luck. Miss Odette taught me. Low heat after the butter. Cold to stop it. Don’t rush the wine.”
Anika’s hand found Delia’s shoulder. “We are going home. We are not deciding anything in a back office at eleven at night while everyone is tired and smelling like fish stock.”
Patricia lifted both palms. “Fair. Sleep on it. The offer can wait a week. It can wait forever. I will not have this restaurant’s name attached to a child labor headline, and I will not have staff turning your daughter into a mascot. Rainer?”
“Agreed,” Rainer said. He looked at Delia then, and for the first time the intrigue in his face included something like respect without ownership. “You were right about the shallots. Thank you for saying it before the plate left.”
Delia nodded. “You’re welcome.”
Outside, the parking lot was damp from an earlier rain. Anika buckled nothing because Delia had been buckling herself for years, but she watched until the click sounded. In the car, jazz murmured low from the radio because Anika couldn’t stand silence when she was angry and couldn’t stand shouting when Delia was already brace-ready.
“I embarrassed you,” Delia said to the windshield.
“You scared me,” Anika corrected. “Those are different. You also put my job and that man’s license in a blender. Delia, baby, your nose is a gift. Your brain is a gift. Emberwick is not a classroom, and Rainer Holst is not Miss Odette.”
“I know.”
“Do you?”
Delia picked at a loose thread on her jeans. “I know enough to know the sauce was going to taste like regret. I didn’t think about insurance.”
Anika exhaled through her nose. “That’s why you have a mother.”
At home, their apartment on the third floor still smelled like this morning’s toast and the citrus cleaner Delia had used on the bathroom sink because she liked sinks that shone. Ellis was awake on the couch with his warehouse boots off and his socks mismatched, scrolling through nothing. He took one look at their faces and sat up.
“Who died?”
“Nobody,” Anika said. “Your daughter conducted a sauce intervention in a professional kitchen.”
Ellis blinked. Then, traitorously, he grinned. “That’s my girl.”