by Grace Palmer
Then, shoved into the back corner, there was the plastic-wrapped bundle.
Brent grabbed the ladder from the wall and climbed up it carefully.
The bag was even dustier than it looked, clearly not touched in years and years. Whatever was inside felt fragile. It shifted and twisted in his hands, and Brent was afraid he’d broken it as he freed it from the jammed-up spot in the far corner.
But when he was back on solid ground, he ripped open the trash bag and realized why it felt so unstable.
It was another mobile.
Brent frowned. His parents had always told him they’d refused to make any other mobiles. That it was for them and them alone. Had Dad finally relented for a friend or a coworker with a newborn on the way?
Or maybe it was a discarded mistake. A slipped hand, a broken chip. But when he held it up, the bobbles hanging from fishing line yellowed with age, Brent didn’t see any obvious mistakes.
This mobile was ocean-themed—or, really, Nantucket-themed. It had seashells, a red-and-white striped lighthouse, a replica of the old mill, and a piece of wood chiseled into the outline of the island.
Then, he saw the name placard at the top.
Christopher.
Brent turned the placard over, and just as he had for each of the other mobiles, his dad had carved a year.
It was a year before his eldest sister Eliza was born.
A flurry of possible explanations rushed through Brent’s mind as he held the carefully-crafted mobile in his hands.
But only one made sense.
His father had only made mobiles for his own children. Never anyone else. Which meant… Christopher must have been one of Henry’s kids.
Brent had a secret brother.
Sara
Little Bull Restaurant
Little Bull was alive.
From where she sat inside her office—drowning with order forms, budget templates, and piles of endless business documents she could make neither heads nor tails of—Sara Benson could hear the kitchen bursting with life behind her.
Lunch service wouldn’t be for another hour, but her staff was already busy. Perfecting sauces, prepping marinades, running the restaurant like the finely-tuned machine that it was.
And they had to be.
People did not schedule reservations three months in advance to have a mediocre meal. They came for food that made them swoon.
And swoon they did. In droves and in repeats, in ones and twos and tens, they came and they ate and they fell in love with the food on their plates. When they left, they told their friends, and those friends told other friends, and before she knew it, Sara Benson was running one of the most popular fine dining restaurants in Nantucket.
Martin Hogan couldn’t kill that if he tried.
He had tried, of course. The notoriously prickish food critic had done has damndest to sever the head from the bull. But to no avail.
Martin wasn’t entirely to blame, though. Gavin Crawford was the true culprit.
So far, Sara had refrained from mailing glowing reviews to her former boss and not-quite-ex. That didn’t mean she wouldn’t do it eventually.
After all, you don’t show up to the opening night of someone’s restaurant, sneering food critic in tow, in order to extort them into sleeping with you—unless you’re overdue for a little karmic revenge.
Sara smiled at the memory.
It never got old, reliving the moment she’d pressed the room key back into Gavin’s big, lusty paw and told him to get lost.
Even if it had resulted in one doozy of a bad review. If the Little Bull had been the Titanic, Hogan’s review was the nearest thing to an iceberg.
But Sara’s little restaurant that could had come out the other side unscathed. Unsinkable.
Though the paperwork piling up on her desk might be the death of her after all.
Sara’s business manager, Patrick Burton, shuffled a stack of papers together on the other side of the desk. He set them aside pointedly, letting them thwack as they hit the table.
Sara, pulled from her thoughts, looked up to find him staring at her, as humorless as ever.
Quickly, she tried to play back the last couple seconds of potential conversation with zero luck. “Sorry, what was that?”
“You’ve had these in front of you for ten minutes,” Patrick repeated, tapping a stack of files in front of her with the tip of his pen. “Are you done with them?”
Patrick knew the answer to that question. Because he knew Sara.
Their relationship worked because they were a study in opposites. Where Sara was driven by excitement and passion, by the raw drive to succeed and prove everyone else wrong, Patrick was driven by numbers. Facts. Organization.
He placed a large importance on petty little nuisances. Things like the bottom line, making payroll, and paying the bills.
She hated that stuff. But without Patrick, Sara would be lost in a stormy Nantucket sea of paperwork and business jargon. It was why she cherished him so.
“So,” she began warily, “hypothetically speaking, if I was to ask you what these papers were for, exactly—not that I don’t know, because I definitely do; I’m just asking to make sure that you know—”
He sighed and cut her off. “Approval on tomorrow’s order, signature of approval on the payroll, and I need the register X-outs and Z-outs for the last week,” Patrick intoned, tone flat, betraying neither annoyance nor patience.
When he was in business mode, he reminded Sara of a robot. A vitally necessary robot, but a robot nonetheless.
“Roger that. Good job—you nailed it. That’s exactly what these are,” she mumbled, lowering her head and getting to work.
In the beginning, Sara assumed the business side of being a business owner would begin to come more naturally to her. Maybe that was still true and, one day, she would be a natural.
Until then, however, she had to muddle along under Patrick’s guidance.
The one thing she’d taken on in the last few months, however, was the X-outs and Z-outs. Patrick had been handling it for her, but Sara wanted to do more than sign order forms. She wanted to understand, at least on some small level, precisely how her business was running.
Unfortunately, the latest batches of numbers were not behaving so neatly.
Sara had been noticing some discrepancies in the last few weeks. They were minor at first, just a few dollars here or there. But as the weeks passed, the squiggly little numbers that refused to lie in place kept growing and growing. Large enough that it was time for Sara to swallow her pride and admit to Patrick that she might not know what she was doing after all.
Surely it was just a math mistake. Sara’s fault, nothing else. Patrick would fix it. Patrick would know what was wrong.
“Okay, so I might have made a mistake.”
“Go on.” He folded his hands on the table and waited for her to continue.
“With the X-outs and Z-outs,” she explained hesitantly, “I’ve noticed some discrepancies. It could be my mistake, but—”
Patrick held out his hand and Sara slid them across the table without a second glance. It felt like passing off a hot potato. Nothing but blissful relief washed through her.
“How long have you been noticing the discrepancy?”
Sara twisted her mouth to one side. “Three weeks, maybe? Definitely no more than four. Five at the most.”
Patrick pushed away from the table and strode out of Sara’s office. She twiddled her thumbs and listened to the sounds of the kitchen. That was where she belonged. With clacking pots and blaring music and the sizzle of delicious things percolating.
Not here, in this stuffy office that smelled overwhelmingly like lavender disinfectant.
A moment later, Patrick reappeared with a small stack of file folders and sat back in front of her. “I’ll check over all the records for the last month. It’ll take me a little while, so if there’s something you need to tend to in the kitchen...”
He shifted his eyes
briefly in the direction of the silver double doors.
“I have prep to do, anyway,” Sara said gratefully. “Gimme a yell when you’re ready for me.”
With that, she slid out of the chair and hurried into the kitchen before Patrick could change his mind.
As she swept into the kitchen, she felt like a kid who’d been told by the principal she could leave detention early. Sometimes she had to remind herself that she was the boss and he was the employee.
Still—no reason to look a gift horse in the mouth, right?
Her seafood supplier had brought in a nice haul of fresh cod that morning that needed to be skinned and deboned. Her sous chef Jose had offered, but Sara asked him to leave it to her.
There was a deep sense of calm that came from the simple act of preparing food. Meditation, in the oddest way. Sara had been doing it long enough that her muscle memory took control. Her mind went blank, and she was able to lose herself in the process. While she worked, time didn’t exist. Nothing existed beyond the countertop and the food in front of her.
The cod was stacked in the refrigerator, already rinsed, dried, and wrapped in wax paper. Waiting for her.
“C’mere, you beauties.” Sara pulled out the tray and plopped it down at her station.
Some people didn’t enjoy the technical, gritty aspects of cooking. When meat needed to be sliced and bones wrenched free.
But Sara loved the physicality of it. It felt like doing something. It felt real.
The white fish was popular with her more finicky patrons, the kind of folks who said they didn’t like the taste of seafood. Paired with a pop of tomato-lime salsa, though, they devoured it and begged for more.
When she finished with the fish, Sara broiled the bell peppers in the oven. Once the skins were blackened and bubbly, she peeled them and threw the steaming insides into the food processer, along with roughly chopped tomatoes and fresh lime juice. A hearty pinch of Maldon sea salt went in last to finish out the simple salsa and bring it all to life.
Just before Sara cranked on the food processer, Patrick called to her from the doorway. “Chef, I think you should come have a look now.”
His voice was low but it carried over the background din of whisks against metal, spatulas against flat tops, dishes and silverware being stacked—the symphony of Sara’s life.
But at the sound of him, her kitchen Zen fell like a ruined soufflé.
Patrick’s face was an unreadable mask of neutrality most of the time. Now was no different. As she reclaimed her seat across from him in the office, Sara couldn’t discern anything from his expression. But she couldn’t shake the feeling there was bad news ahead.
Her default belief was that she’d messed up. Not that that was so rare—Sara messed up all the time.
It was the admitting-she-messed-up that didn’t happen so often.
Growing up, her siblings had actually cheered the few times Sara had admitted she’d been wrong.
In this case, however, she would’ve shouted it from the rooftops or bought a Times Square billboard to proclaim her wrongness. That was better than the alternative:
That someone was stealing from Little Bull.
That possibility was bad enough. And it got worse. As much as Sara would like to believe a masked stranger was sneaking in at night and skimming cash from the till, it was most likely one of her thoroughly-interviewed-and-background-checked employees.
Perhaps Sara had to accept her ability to discern people’s character was as deficient as her business skills. After all, she’d once been head over heels for Gavin. Now, she knew he was a greasy, smooth-talking playboy.
Who else had she read completely wrong?
“Okay. Lay it on me,” Sara said, taking a deep breath.
Pushing a single sheet across the table, Patrick began to explain. “This should be self-explanatory. It’s all the discrepancies in a single list.”
Patrick’s tediously neat handwriting filled two columns. Sara read over both of them carefully. It was a detail of the shortages with the dates and shifts on which they’d happened.
“This has been happening longer than I thought,” she noticed.
Patrick nodded. “And the discrepancy is growing each time.”
He was right. The first theft was a measly three dollars, but the most recent one totaled over fifty. How could anyone expect that much money would go unnoticed?
She swallowed down the lump of dread that had formed in her throat. Each of her employees flitted through her mind like a spinning wheel on a game show.
Which one will the ticker land on? she wondered.
There wasn’t a single employee Sara could imagine stealing from her. She could say without blinking that she trusted each and every one of them.
Or at least, she used to.
Each employee had a personal identification number to enter on the register for each ticket, and the register wouldn’t work unless a PIN was entered. The staff had been told not to share their numbers with anyone else, so barring a tech error, the missing money should be easy to track back to a single employee.
Patrick’s mind was in the same place. He slid another piece of paper across the table.
“This is the schedule for the last six weeks. With employee PIN numbers.”
“Have you already looked?” she asked.
He shook his head. “I didn’t think it was my place. They are your employees.”
Sara couldn’t decide if she was relieved or disappointed.
“Do you want me to do it?” he offered cautiously.
For a moment, Sara considered throwing the papers at Patrick and running back to the kitchen. That’s where she felt safe, confident. She could call out someone for over-salting meat or keeping a messy work station.
But theft? Here, Sara was out of her depth.
Patrick was right, though. This person was her employee. It was her responsibility to clean up the mess.
“No, I’ll do it.” Sara placed the schedule beside the list Patrick had compiled and began to compare times.
By the end of the first column, the culprit was obvious.
Casey Norman.
Still, Sara did her due diligence and checked the other column against the schedule, too. And sure enough, each time money had gone missing, it was Casey’s name on the schedule. It was Casey’s PIN that opened the register.
“Casey,” Sara muttered, flipping the schedule closed and shaking her head. “It’s Casey Norman.”
Patrick twisted his mouth to the side in disappointment. The most outright expression of emotion Sara had seen from him.
Casey often brought in baked goods and side dishes for family dinner—a meal for the employees to eat together before shift started. Even though Patrick was usually gone by then, Casey always made sure to leave a goody bag on his desk.
He was a nice guy. One of hers. One of theirs.
Or rather, he was—once upon a time.
Now, he was something else entirely.
Why couldn’t employees be as easy to manage as vegetables? Sara wondered idly. Vegetables never stole from you. Vegetables never broke your heart. And when a vegetable was rotten, you just threw it out and kept on chopping.
People? Not so easy.
“You need to confront him about this, Sara.”
“You’re right,” she sighed. “I’ll call him.”
She knew if she didn’t do it now, she’d chicken out. So Sara grabbed her phone, cued up her contacts, and hit Casey’s name before she could think about it too much.
Casey answered on the second ring. “Hey, Chef! What’s up?”
She almost expected to hear more malice in his voice. Something slimy and deceptive she’d never noticed. But Casey sounded chipper as ever.
“Hey, Casey. Something came up, and I wondered if you’d come in today to, uh, chat?”
Don’t raise your pitch at the end like that, she counseled herself. Just say what you mean. Cut out the rotten bits.
“Do y
ou need me to cover Josh’s shift tonight?” he inquired warily.
“No, Josh is fine. Or at least I think he is,” Sara said, looking for some wood to knock on. She didn’t want to jinx anything going wrong with the rest of her waitstaff. “I just want to talk. Shouldn’t take more than a few minutes.”
Casey hummed, thinking. “I’m free in a few hours, but that would be in the middle of the dinner rush…”
Sara shuddered. Absolutely not. She had a vivid and horrific memory of being cut from the cast smack dab in the middle of rehearsals for Les Misérables in seventh grade. She had no desire to pass that public mortification onto anyone else.
If Casey had to be let go, it didn’t need to be witnessed by the rest of the waitstaff. They’d gossip enough as it was.
“I’m on the schedule tomorrow,” he continued. “Would you rather talk about it then?”
Yes, she wanted to scream. God, yes, she would.
Better yet, she’d rather talk about it never. She’d rather scrub plates or complete inventory or, hell, do more paperwork than look someone in the eye and ask, “Did you steal from me?”
Unfortunately, that wasn’t an option.
“I understand if you can’t make it, but I’d like to take care of it as soon as possible. If it wasn’t important, I wouldn’t call you in on your day off.”
“Of course, Chef. I have an appointment in an hour, so I can’t stay long, but I could be there in twenty minutes?”
“Perfect. It’ll be quick,” she said. “See you in twenty.”
She hung up the phone and dropped down into her chair, suddenly exhausted.
Patrick materialized in the doorway, his shoulder leaning against the frame. “I can sit in on the meeting if you want. In case things go south.”
“Thanks, but no thanks. Some things I’ve gotta do myself.”
He nodded. “I’ll be in the back if you need me.” Then he rapped his knuckles on the door frame as a goodbye and disappeared.
Sara stared at the mountains of paperwork on her desk. This little baby of hers, this Little Bull, was alive, wasn’t it? Hadn’t she birthed it and nurtured it and raised it this far?
