Page 80 of Chef's Kiss at the Chalet
Then my phone vibrated in my pocket with a text from Megan:
Megan:The parking lot’s snowed in. I’m still trying to dig out my car.
Damn it. If I didn’t send out the squash, Mrs. Hawthorne would know something had gone wrong. She’d rip me to shreds. I had no choice.
I chased after Charles, into the staff corridor and outside into the freezing snow.
“Wait!” I called after him.
Charles abruptly turned, snow hitting him sideways. He wasn’t even wearing a coat, and I wondered why he hadn’t left through the house, where it was warm and protected.
“I’m really in the shit,” I confessed, pleading as I stood in the whirling snow, my feet soaked and the moisture seeping into my black chef’s coat. “I forgot the sage for the hors d’oeuvres and Megan is snowed in at The Snowdrift. If your mother realizes I’ve fucked this up, I’m fired. What do I do?”
“How much time do we have?” he asked, standing in the blizzard like it didn’t affect him at all.
“I don’t know. Like, thirty minutes before she realizes something’s up?”
“I’ll be back in twenty,” he said.
“Wait! What are you going to do?”
Twenty minutes wasn’t enough time to get down the mountain and back up again, even in good weather. If The Snowdrift was snowed in, there was no way he’d make it to the market. Even in the Land Rover.
“Trust me,” he said.
And in that moment, I had no choice.
Chapter 30
The first five canapés started to go out at a steady pace, while we fired the first dinner courses. I anxiously watched the clock over my shoulder while furiously stirring my risotto. Any minute, I expected to hear the click of Mrs. Hawthorne’s stilettos on the tile. Instead, it was Amelia who burst into the kitchen.
She strode up to me in a sequined black gown, her bouncy curls pulled into a loose updo with tendrils framing her face.
“Can I speak with you?” she said, her eyes urgent behind black eyeliner.
“Can we talk after dinner? I really have to keep an eye on this risotto.”
Her posture stiffened. Something was off. Amelia seemed troubled and not her usual bubbly self. I called one of the sous over to the stove to take my place and walked Amelia out to the corridor and around the corner. From her sequined clutch, she pulled out her phone.
“This is you, right?” She opened Instagram and showed me the screen, her tone sharp. “Après Brie?”
My stomach dropped. It felt like all the oxygen had been sucked out of the room.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said, my voice too soft to be convincing.
Her expression hardened. “I’ve seen the posts. The witty captions. The not-so-subtle digs at the lifestyles of the ‘rich and pretentious.’ It’s all there.”
I swallowed hard, my pulse pounding in my ears. “I haven’t said anything—anything bad about your family. It’s just food, Amelia. Just . . . my perspective on the job.”
“Stop.” She held up her hand, shaking her head. “You can try to justify it all you want, but the fact is, you’ve been using us. UsingCharles. You’ve been building your brand off our backs and taking pot shots at us all the while.”
Amelia sounded very much like her mother in that moment. Icy and intimidating.
“I haven’t—”
“Why?” she interrupted. “I thought we were friends. Were we really so awful? I understand blowing off steam, but do it in private. That was the only thing we asked. Instead, you drag this family all over social media. How is that fair?”
“Amelia, no. It’s not like that.”
