Chapter 6: The Walkout

I didn't take the envelope.

Neil stood there holding it across the brunch table.

"Put it in the mail," I said. "I'll read it when I have time."

"You don't have a job. You have nothing but time."

"Then I'll read it slowly."

I walked out through the front hall.

Behind me, Lorna told the maid to air out the dining room.

Monday I went back to Ellsworth House.

Not for Neil.

For my grandmother's copper pots.

There were six of them, hanging over the pastry station.

June Ashby had cooked in them in a diner in Ohio for forty years.

I'd hung them in Neil's kitchen the day we opened.

Four o'clock was pre-service.

The line would be in, the dining room empty.

I came in through the alley door like I had every day for five years.

The kitchen smelled wrong.

Old oil. Burnt garlic. A walk-in that nobody had wiped down.

Katie was at the sauté station, scraping a pan.

The rest of the line was quiet and gray-faced.

Brittany was at the pass with her phone on a tripod.

She was filming herself tasting a sauce.

"Mm. Yeah, this is giving," she told the camera.

Then she saw me.

"Oh, you've got to be kidding me."

"I'm here for my pots," I said. "They're personal property. They came from my grandmother."

"Everything in this kitchen belongs to Ellsworth House."

"Those don't."

I pulled a stepstool over to the pastry station.

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