Could Charlie blame her?
Yeah, the answer to that was no, she absolutely could not.
Chapter Four
Charlie fucking Stetko.
Of all the people in the world, the last person Emma ever thought she’d see stroll into her restaurant? Like, ever? Charlie fucking Stetko. Didn’t Charlie say she would never come back to Shaker Falls? Emma snorted quietly at the irony. She’d said the same thing once upon a time, yet here she was.
Chopping onions. A great, mindless chore. Years of culinary school and then working in the tense and demanding environment of a high-end restaurant meant Emma could chop onions and barely pay attention. Chopping had become second nature to her, and she did it when she needed to think. Even if she didn’t need anything chopped.
Charlie fucking Stetko.
Different. That’s how Charlie looked to her. Still heart-stoppingly beautiful—Emma had resigned herself long ago to the fact that she’d always think so—but different. Smaller. Deflated. Maybe a little broken. And while some part of Emma smirked at that—why wouldn’t she?—a bigger part hated it. She had loved Charlie once, loved her deeply and with everything she had, and despite the pain Charlie had caused her, she didn’t want to see her unhappy. She still cared about her and that was okay.
Two and a half years of therapy. That’s what it had taken for her to be able to say that.
Emma grabbed another onion, expertly peeled it, and set to chopping. It was her eyes. There was something in Charlie’s eyes. Those gorgeous hazel eyes that Emma had always felt so safe in. So loved. Now they held something…sad. That was it. That was the word. Charlie was sad. Emma wasn’t sure if other people would notice, but she knew those eyes better than she knew her own, even after all this time, and they carried something heavy in them. The realization felt heavy to Emma as well.
No. No, no, no.
Her knife stopped for a moment. Hovered above the onion. No, she couldn’t think about this. She didn’t want to think about this. It was long ago. Years. Charlie had crushed her, had run off to New York and had done exactly what Emma had warned her about. She got sucked in by that Manhattanite shrew, just as Emma had predicted she would. Granted, she had not expected it to last for years. Rather, she’d predicted a fling. A few months. Maybe a year, and then it would be over, Charlie would have it out of her system, and they’d figure things out.
But that hadn’t happened. Charlie hadn’t come back to her. They hadn’t even stayed friends, though Emma did realize that was probably a good thing, for a while. She had spent years working through it all. Her friends didn’t seem to understand the depths of her feelings for Charlie. There’d been a lot of You deserve better, and You can have any girl you want, and Just let her go, but none of that had helped because Charlie had been it for her. The One. Capital T, capital O. She’d been so sure of it.
Ridiculous and naïve.
That’s what Emma had been. Her therapist would disagree, tell her to stop beating herself up for loving somebody deeply, but Emma just felt stupid, because it had become pretty obvious Charlie hadn’t felt the same way about her. It was the only explanation.
“Hey, Em?” Sabrina Tate’s voice cut into Emma’s thoughts and Emma looked up. Her bartender was tall, very sexy, and right then, her dark eyes held worry and a hint of confusion. “You okay?”
A curt nod. Chopped onions into a hot pan, the sizzle of them in the oil creating one bar of the music of her kitchen.
“I think your mom’s ready to go.”
Translation: Your mom has had more than enough to drink. Emma knew that, and she gave another nod. “I’ll get her an Uber.” She took out her phone, did so, and reported the make, model, and driver to Sabrina to pass along—the same make, model, and driver, Tom, that usually came, since a town as small as Shaker Falls didn’t exactly have a bevy of Uber drivers. Then she picked up her towel and grabbed the hot handle of the pan, tossing the onions expertly. She could feel Sabrina still standing there. Waiting for something more. Expectant. Always so expectant. But Emma didn’t look up from the pan until she knew she was gone.
Sabrina.
Yeah, she was an issue all of her own.
That rabbit hole was a dangerous one. Emma was far too familiar with it. Before she could get sucked in, Jules, one of her waitresses, burst into the kitchen with an order, the way Jules burst in anywhere she went. The girl had more energy and presence than anybody else Emma knew. It made her very likable as a waitress, if not a little bit annoying when you were feeling pensive.
“One filet, one pork tenderloin,” Jules reported, knowing she didn’t need to announce the orders because they showed up on the screen mounted near Emma’s head. She just liked to and always did when she entered the kitchen to get salads for her customers.
“Got it.” Emma got to work on the dinners, happy to push Charlie and Sabrina out of her mind, at least for a while.
* * *
Exhaustion. You got used to it. Who knew?
The first couple of weeks EG’s was open, Emma would end up so utterly wiped out, she wondered if she’d ever be able to wake up in the morning. It surprised her, the bone-melting fatigue that had set in. After all, she’d apprenticed under a high-profile chef, worked grueling hours for him for nearly two years, yet had never felt so completely clobbered at the end of her shift. Not the way she did when she headed up to her apartment after a busy night at her restaurant.
Gabe Battaglia, one of her instructors in culinary school and a man who’d become an advisor and friend, finally explained it to her in a way that she understood.
“You’re running the whole show.” He’d said it simply, gruffly as he said most things, and with such nonchalance that it surprised Emma.
“Yeah. So?” This wasn’t news.
“You’re running the whole show.” He stressed the last two words the second time. “Believe me, that carries a lot more weight, whether you realize it or not. You have so much more on your plate—forgive the pun—than cooking and creating. You’ve got the staff and the inventory and the planning and the money…For fuck’s sake, the money alone is enough to drive a person mad.”
She got it then. Crystal clear. Like a bulb went off and illuminated what she hadn’t been able to see. There was so much more to deal with as the owner/proprietor. Not that she didn’t know this going in—she was a smart woman and she hadn’t gone into restaurant ownership blind. The opposite, actually: she’d studied and researched and read and read and read probably way more than she’d needed to before she decided to purchase the place. She’d gone into this business with her eyes wide-open. She’d just never bargained for the level of exhaustion she faced.
Now, it was closing in on midnight, and she was on her couch in her apartment, upstairs, above the restaurant. Laptop open on her thighs, glass of Bordeaux within reach, glasses perched on her nose while she went over the books. Sabrina had tried to garner an invitation to join her—she’d tried hard, really, and Emma had to give her kudos—but she had stood firm, told her she had a bunch of work to get done. Not a lie at all, as evidenced by the spreadsheet gracing her screen. But also not the entire truth.
Because the entire truth was: Charlie.
Charlie was on her mind and had been since Emma had walked out of the kitchen and found her standing in her restaurant.
So many emotions had run through Emma’s mind then and had continued to speed a circular path in her brain for the entire evening. Emotions at NASCAR. That’s what it felt like. Round and round and round. She’d been able to push them into a corner, at least for a little while, so she could focus on her cooking, on her customers, but she’d been very aware that they were there, waiting, revving their engines, and that they’d come blasting out as soon as the last plate left her kitchen.
And they had.
Confusion was first, which surprised her, because why not anger? She’d expected anger. She’d expected that the most. But it was confusion, as if seeing Charlie standing in her r
estaurant made zero sense in the grand scheme of life, as if Charlie was a figure that had been slapped onto the wrong painting, out of place and confusing to all onlookers.
Charlie had seemed confused, too. That was…well, it wasn’t surprising, if Emma was being honest. Like Charlie, she had also vowed not to return to Shaker Falls, yet here she was, with her own business, obviously announcing some semblance of permanence. No wonder Charlie’d had that divot over her nose, the one that always formed when she was thinking hard or couldn’t figure something out. Emma had wanted to reach out and smooth it with her thumb the way she used to when they were studying in high school.
Why is she here? Why is Charlie back in Shaker Falls?
Just visiting, probably. That made the most sense. And that would definitely be best for Emma. The last thing she needed was to run into the woman who’d shattered her heart into a million pieces on a regular basis. No, thank you.
Her phone pinged, which was a good thing, as it yanked her out of her head and back into reality. Present day. The now. And the now included her mom texting her to say good night.
Sleep tight, Emma-love, the text read. She’d spelled everything correctly, which was always a good sign. It meant she’d either gone easier tonight than on most of her nights off, or if she hadn’t, she’d recovered a bit. Whichever it was, Emma felt that old familiar relief, and her tense muscles relaxed just a bit.
You good? Emma typed back.
Yep! That was followed by a barrage of various emojis. Her mother was enamored of them and way overused them. Which was super cute and made Emma grin most of the time.
Good night, Mom. I love you.
Emma set the phone aside and pulled off her glasses, rubbed the bridge of her nose. She was tired and emotionally drained, and what she needed was her bed. Maybe tonight, she’d actually sleep.
She’d seen Charlie.
She hadn’t fallen apart.
Okay, good. That’s done, and hopefully, she’ll head back to the city and I won’t have to see her again anytime soon.
Chapter Five
Sleep still hated Charlie.
She was still having tons of trouble getting a decent night’s sleep at her parents’ house. But it wasn’t because of her overworked brain, well, not always. It wasn’t because she was uncomfortable. The basement, basically her own apartment, was perfect and above and beyond anything she’d expected. No, she couldn’t complain about that. She had everything she needed down there; it was kind of awesome. But still, sleep played a brilliant game of hide-and-seek…and was winning.
It was the quiet.
In the five years she’d lived in New York—first in a miniscule apartment with six roommates, then in Darcy’s penthouse near Central Park—she’d surprisingly grown used to the sounds of it. They didn’t call it The City That Never Sleeps for no reason. It truly did not. Traffic, car horns, sirens, shouting. All hours, day and night, it went on, and after a while, it became a sort of soundtrack that she had come to expect, though it took her a good six months before it felt normal. So, lying there in her parents’ basement in Shaker Falls, Vermont, gazing out the sliding glass doors at the silent and peaceful woods beyond the yard, everything just felt so quiet. Eerily so.
Charlie missed the city. She missed her quote-unquote friends there, noting that she’d started putting quotation marks around the word in her head because she had only heard from one of them since she left. She missed the king-size bed she was used to and the warm body that had been in it with her. She missed the charity work she was just starting to get into. She missed the business world that she was just starting to get into.
And Darcy. God help her, she missed Darcy.
That last one was the hardest. She missed Darcy and hated admitting it. To herself or to anybody else. Despite what Darcy’d put her through, despite the way she’d done things, despite the fact that Darcy had left her with very little money and no place to go, Charlie missed her anyway. She hated her and she loved her and she missed her and that made her angry. She’d texted her when she’d first gotten into bed. Just like before. I miss you. She’d gotten no response. Just like before.
It was probably safe to assume that was still one reason she couldn’t sleep, in addition to the quiet.
Another was pretty obvious: Emma.
Of all the ways she’d envisioned seeing Emma again, walking into a restaurant in tiny Shaker Falls and seeing her in her chef’s coat, all authoritative and distant, wasn’t really one of them. Though it didn’t really make sense that it wasn’t.
Charlie sighed and shook the image of Emma’s gorgeous face and smooth skin and lack of enthusiasm over seeing her aside and turned to gaze out the sliding glass door.
Black to deep blue to indigo to light pink. The colors morphed and shifted as she lay there watching. Eventually, movement above her in the kitchen caught her attention, as did the heavenly aroma of coffee, and she decided she might as well get up and get some caffeine into her system asap. Work. A job. She needed to find some kind of temporary employment while she figured out her next move and how to get back to the city. The agenda for the day. While her parents wouldn’t hear of taking any money from her for rent, Charlie was no freeloader. If they wouldn’t take rent, she’d find other ways to pay them back. Buy groceries, fill their cars with gas, take them to dinner, whatever she could do to show her gratitude. But in order to do any of those things, she needed money, which meant finding a job.
Not something she was looking forward to.
In the kitchen, she found Sherry. Charlie had expected her dad. “Morning,” she said, her voice husky. She cleared her throat.
“Hey,” Sherry said, not looking at her. Her purple scrubs were cute, Charlie noticed, as she filled a big blue travel mug with coffee.
“Look at you, all doctor-y.” Charlie felt herself well up with pride. Sherry had wanted to work with animals since she was about five years old. A bird had flown into their bay window and lay stunned on the lawn, its wing possibly broken. Their dad wanted to put it out of its misery, but Sherry begged him to let her take care of it. And damn if she didn’t nurse that bird back to health until it was able to fly away on its own. Her patience was astounding, and when Charlie looked back on that whole thing, it was so obvious Sherry was meant to be doing exactly what she was doing. “How’s life as a vet tech?” Charlie asked, pulling a mug from the cupboard.
“It’s good.” Sherry poured soy creamer into her coffee, shouldered a bag, and left out the side door with nothing else to add. She wasn’t really a morning person, never had been, so Charlie decided to chalk up her icy demeanor to that, even though she suspected there might be more to it.
Resigned and a little disappointed, Charlie doctored her own coffee with too much sugar and just enough cream to make it slightly less than black. As always, that first sip was magic, the caffeine racing through her system, poking and prodding it awake.
Little by little, the house came alive. Her mother came down only a few minutes after Sherry left, gave her a kiss good morning, and pulled eggs and bacon from the fridge. Every morning since Charlie could remember, her mother had cooked bacon and eggs for her father’s breakfast, and she was pretty sure her mom could do it with her eyes closed by now. Eggs over easy, bacon extra crispy, white toast now multigrain toast—a change he’d agreed to in order to keep the bacon, Charlie recalled—coffee, and orange juice. Every day. Charlie’s father was a creature of routine, there was no doubt about that, and she smiled to herself.
Contentedness and comfort were like a warm throw draped over her shoulders as she sat sipping her coffee, the morning rituals of the Stetko household taking place around her. There was something hypnotic in it, and though she tried to elaborate on the feeling in her mind, the simple conclusion was that it was all very…peaceful. Comfortable. Familiar. Her mother’s unhurried movements, her father appearing in his work pants and flannel shirt, placing kisses on Charlie’s head and her mother’s lips. For the first time in ye
ars, she admitted to herself that she might have missed this. Maybe. Just a little.
Her dad ate his breakfast while scrolling on his phone.
“No newspaper, Dad?”
“What am I, a dinosaur?” he asked, his eyes never leaving the screen in his hand.
Charlie grinned as her mother set a plate in front of her. Scrambled eggs, two slices of bacon, no toast. Charlie looked up at her, opened her mouth to speak.
“Eat,” her mother said, a hand held up to keep Charlie quiet. “You’re way too skinny.”
“Agreed,” her dad said, still not looking away from his phone, which was dwarfed by his enormous hand. She wondered when her rather old-fashioned father had come into the twenty-first century. It was weird. But in a weirdly good way.
Charlie surprised herself by eating every last bite of breakfast, her dad leaving in the midst of her chowing down like she hadn’t seen food for days, as her mom sat at the table with her tea—she hated coffee—and watched.
“Why are you grinning at me?” Charlie asked.
Elbow propped on the table, chin in her hand. “Mothers love to see their children eat. It’s a thing.”
Charlie chuckled. “Oh, I see.”
A soothing aura. That’s what her mom had. She’d noticed it, thought about it a lot when she was younger, no way to really explain it. When people were around her mom, they were relaxed. She had that effect somehow. So even though there were elements of shame and frustration at being home indefinitely, sitting with her mother calmed those feelings, as if she took the weight of whatever was sitting on Charlie’s shoulders off. At least for a few moments.
“You got plans today?” her mom asked, then sipped her tea, the little red tag hanging down the side of the mug identifying it as English Breakfast.
“Gotta make some money.”
“Oh!” An upheld finger, a disappearance from the kitchen. Charlie could hear her rummaging around in a drawer in the dining room, and when she returned, she slid a business card in front of her.
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