Total pages in book: 127
Estimated words: 122506 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 613(@200wpm)___ 490(@250wpm)___ 408(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 122506 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 613(@200wpm)___ 490(@250wpm)___ 408(@300wpm)
I know Baba was doing her absolute best. She just came from a different time and a different place. She uprooted her life, moved from her village—the only home she’d ever known—to look after me. The least I can do now is repay that care.
“Do you still live with your grandmother?”
Can’t we go back to laughing over misunderstandings and threesomes with the French pastry chef? It’s hardly a sexy question. The answer even less so.
“I’m still living in her flat. But not for much longer.” Under the table, I cross my fingers. Please let it be so. At least now I’ll have money, which means I’ll also have choices. “My business was struggling.” I shrug.
Fin’s expression turns pensive, which is better than sympathy. “Breakups are a lot.”
“True story.” My gaze dips as I draw my finger through the condensation on my glass. “It wasn’t because of the breakup, though I’m sure it couldn’t have helped. I didn’t cancel on my clients. They canceled on me.” I feel my brows knit, my mind wandering down that well-trodden path of how. “Now that I think of it, the cancellations began not long after we met.”
“Maybe the financial downturn? It’s been hard on people.”
I give my head a quick shake. “Not the kind of people I was dealing with. Money wasn’t an issue for them. Some of them even forfeited their entire fees. There are no refunds after a certain period in the contract, you see.” At least I still got paid for those.
“Did you have many cancellations?”
“Yes,” I admit, glancing up. “And then future bookings started to fail.”
“Did you ask your clients why they canceled?”
“The ones who would return my calls,” I reply. “Not that they were very forthcoming. The ones I managed to speak to were cold—icy cold, come to think of it. But I had other things going on. I didn’t have the brain space to dwell, because my grandmother . . .” There are too few words and too many thoughts for me to adequately explain.
I knew Baba’s health was beginning to fail, but it took living with her again to notice that her mind was failing too. There was, and there is, a lot of guilt with those realizations. She gave up her life to look after me, and when the time came that she needed me to pay attention to her, I was too wrapped up in my own problems to notice.
“Tough times,” he says softly.
“Yeah. It sounds strange, but I wondered for a time if what was going on with my business might somehow be linked to the night we met.”
“How do you mean?” Fin tilts his head as though he doesn’t want to miss a thing.
“I’m not sure, really. The timing, I suppose. I know it was just a coincidence, but I did consider it. Remember I told you how I heard about Adam’s engagement?”
“Yeah.”
“So I was hiding in the closet after one of the chefs told me Adam had just proposed.”
“Because he didn’t have the balls to tell you himself,” he repeats, his disgust still very evident.
“Well, I suppose I lost my composure.”
Lost your shit, more like, not-Ronny counters.
“I can see that happening.”
“The news of his engagement was just the tip of a very nasty iceberg. You see, as far as they were concerned—the kitchen crew and the waitstaff, the management, even—Adam had been single the whole time we were engaged. And that’s why the chef added how surprised they all were that Rachel, the ex–duty manager, had accepted his proposal.” I inhale deeply. “You see, Adam had boned half of the hotel’s servers that year.”
“Oh, Mila.”
“So not only did I find out he was engaged just weeks after our split, which was suspicious enough, but I also discovered he’d been chronically unfaithful. It wasn’t just that hotel either. He’d been flaunting his infidelity right under my nose. Probably for years.”
“Ah, shit.”
“It was a bit shit,” I answer breezily as I ignore my burning cheeks and the poke of discomfort in my chest. I feel like such an idiot recounting this. “He let me get excited about our wedding. He let me waffle on about colors and flowers, make a down payment on catering, and even buy a dress. And all the while, he had no intention of getting married. Not to me, anyway.”
“That is fucked up. So fucked up.”
“So I wondered . . .” I straighten the dessert plate an inch, move my napkin from the right of the table to the left. Anything rather than see his pity. “Wondered if the news somehow got out that I’d completely lost it in the hotel kitchen. That I shouted and I cried and cursed and basically made a holy show of myself. I wondered if that’s why—if I’d been deemed mentally unstable. I mean, it was completely out of character and so unprofessional. I was mortified the next day, and for many days afterward.”