You Are My Destiny novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: Hired Hands

Kira takes a kitchen shift at the Stannard welcome dinner, and the man who owes her his eyes looks straight at her and does not know her.

The Stannard house had forty-one windows on the lake side.

I counted them from the caterer's van because I did not want to count my heartbeats.

I don't drive after dark.

My boss's niece had met us at the Chicago bus station at four, when the light was still good, and driven us north.

Her company was two cooks short for the Stannard welcome dinner, and I had said yes before she finished asking.

Junie sat on an upturned crate in the back pantry with a dish of pears and a plastic horse.

"Stay here," I told her. "If anyone asks, you're my niece and your name is Junie."

"It is my name."

"Good. That part is easy."

The head chef gave me a white jacket and a name tag.

He had written BREE on it, because I had said Kira and he had heard half.

I did not correct him.

Bree Lowe was a woman nobody had ever married.

I took the poaching station, and the work took my hands.

Whitefish went in, and dill, and butter, and the steam climbed into my face.

Through the swinging door came the sound of a hundred people being rich at each other.

I plated twelve at a time.

My left eye, the clouded one, gave me a blur at the edge of everything.

So I kept my chin turned to the right.

"Chef says the guest of honor wants to thank the kitchen," a waiter said.

The line went quiet.

The door swung open and Phillip Stannard walked in.

He was taller than he had looked on television, with dark hair cut close and a jaw that was harder than I remembered.

I had never seen his face before this week.

In the cabin I had learned it with my fingers and my mouth.

His mouth was the same.

I went on laying fish on porcelain, and my hands kept moving because they did not know any better.

"Thank you," he said to the room. "Dinner is the best I've had in years."

The chef made a pleased noise.

Phillip moved down the line, shaking hands, and the hush followed him.

He stopped at my station.

He was close enough that I could smell him, soap and cedar.

Underneath was something cold, the way he had smelled after a swim in October.

"Whitefish," he said.

"Yes, sir."

My voice came out of someone else.

"With dill."

"Yes, sir."

"Where did you learn to do it this way? With the skin up, in the butter first."

"My grandmother."

That was a lie.

My mother had taught me, in a kitchen with a cracked window, in the year before she lost her sight.

He tilted his head and looked straight at me.

I stood still under it.

For seven years I had wondered what it would be like to be seen by him.

Now he was looking, with the eye I had given him.

He saw a cook in a white jacket with a clouded eye and a burn scar on her wrist.

He did not know me.

His face did not change at all.

"It's very good," he said, and moved on.

A spoon slipped out of my hand and rang on the floor.

I picked it up, and my fingers were cold.

I told myself that was what I had wanted.

I had wanted him to have the world and not owe me.

It did not feel like winning.

The service ended at ten, and I scrubbed the station until the steel shone.

I was reaching for a towel when a hand closed around my elbow and pulled me into the dry pantry.

Rosalind DeGraff, in cream silk, shut the door behind us.

Up close she was prettier than on television, with pale skin and eyes.

Both of them worked perfectly.

She looked at my left eye under the bare bulb and her smile stopped moving.

"Well," she said softly. "Aren't you a long way from the lake."

"I don't know you."

"You know the ring."

She held up her hand, and the brass band sat on her finger.

"You took it off his tray," I said.

"Nobody looks at the volunteer who reads to the blind men."

She said it lightly.

"He told me everything. The cabin, the stove that smoked, the girl who brought groceries and sang off key."

"I sang fine."

"You hummed," Rosalind said. "He's hoping I do."

She took an envelope from her clutch and held it out between two fingers.

"Fifty thousand. Tonight. There's a bus at six."

"I came for a job."

"You came for him. The reward is a million dollars, Bree."

She said the name like it tasted bad.

"I'll make it a hundred."

"Is that what he's worth?"

"Is it what you think you're worth?"

I looked at the envelope and then at her face.

"He'll find out," I said.

"He never saw you," Rosalind said. "He's got no way to prove I'm not you, and you've got no way to prove you are."

Someone knocked twice on the pantry door.

It was the butler, white-gloved and stiff.

"Miss," he said to me, and ignored Rosalind. "Mr. Augustin Stannard wants the cook with the bad eye in his library. Now."

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