"Good. They liked the food."
"They better have. You prepped for two days." She glances at me sideways. "Any of them cute?"
"All of them, obviously."
"Obviously. And?"
"And nothing. They're friends."
"Uh huh." Sarah has a gift for packing an entire interrogation into two syllables. "That's why you've been humming while you work for the first time in three years."
"I always hum."
"You hum when you're stress-baking at home. Here you're silent because Gordon screams if he hears it. Today you're humming." She points her paring knife at me. "Someone made you hum, Robin."
I open my mouth to deflect — it's what I do, it's what I'm built for, I have seventeen different ways to redirect a conversation away from my actual feelings — but Sarah's known me for years. She was here my first week, when I burned an entire sheet of puff pastry and cried in the walk-in. She covered for me when I showed up hungover after a breakup that wasn't really a breakup because you can't break up with someone you were never actually dating. She knows where all my armor has gaps.
"There's a guy," I admit. "But it's nothing."
"Name?"
"Vaughn."
"Ooh. What does he do?"
"He's a mechanic. Fixes motorcycles."
"Hot." Sarah grins. "Is he into you?"
"He's into tolerating me. I think I annoy him. I definitely annoy him. But sometimes he looks at me like—" I stop. Pipe another mousse. Steady hands. "It doesn't matter. I don't do relationships."
"You don't do relationships, or you don't know how to do relationships? Because those are very different problems."
I hate Sarah sometimes. I hate her because she's right and because she says the quiet part out loud and because her paring knife never slips even when she's psychoanalyzing me.
"Same difference," I say, and she lets it go because the back door slams and Gordon's here.
You can map Gordon's mood by how hard the door hits the wall. Today it rebounds off the stopper and nearly closes again, which means we're at about a seven out of ten. Manageable. Not great.
"Morning, Chef," Sarah and I say in unison, because we've learned.
Gordon barely acknowledges us. He's a big man — not tall, but wide, the kind of guy who takes up more space than his body accounts for. Ruddy face, thinning hair he combs over with aggressive optimism, hands like catcher's mitts. He was a good chef once, apparently. There are photos in his office from twenty years ago — thinner Gordon, sharper Gordon, Gordon with awards and handshakes and a smile that actually reached his eyes. That Gordon is gone. This Gordon runs a mid-tier catering company that survives on corporate contracts and a staff too scared or too broke to leave.
He does a lap of the kitchen. Checks Sarah's prep, grunts. Moves to my station.
I've piped forty mousse molds. They're perfect — smooth tops, consistent portions, exactly the depth he specified. The coulis is strained and glossy. The tuile batter is resting in the fridge. The display cake layers are cooling on racks.
Gordon picks up a mousse mold, tilts it, sets it down. "Coulis is too thick."
It's not too thick. I tested it twice. "I can thin it out if you'd like, Chef."
"I'd like you to get it right the first time." He picks up the squeeze bottle, holds it up to the light like he's examining a specimen. "This is supposed to drizzle, not glop. Are you trying to make it look like a crime scene?"
"I'll adjust the consistency."
"You'll redo it. All of it." He sets the bottle down hard enough that coulis spatters across my station. "And the mousse needs more gelatin. It's too soft."
The mousse is perfect. The gelatin ratio is textbook. But I've been here long enough to know that this isn't about the mousse.