I dash into the rear entrance of Knife feeling like the forces of excitement and euphoria are carrying me, a hurricane of glee that pushes me onward. The windows I picked out are going into the new location today—Andre assures me that his guys are the best—and it’ll be done by the time I get off work if I want to see. It’s a small thing, but it sets a smile on my face that I haven’t been able to remove all morning, and though my body is going through the motions of putting on my whites and starting my shift, my consciousness is flying about thirty-thousand feet in the air.

“Hey Michelle. Hey Warren. Hey Carrie,” I say, chirpily. Then, even though—no, because— he hates it, “Hey Leo, how you doing?”

Before Leo can grunt and shake his head at me like an old man seeing a young couple kiss in public, Michelle comes over.

“Willow?” she says, and I look to see a rare kind of smile in those strong, dark features. “Cole’s in his office. He wanted to have a word with you.”

“Oh, sure,” I say, nodding, my heart racing now for different reasons.

I finish washing my hands and take my time drying them as slowly as possible on the journey to the back office. Once again it feels like things are moving way too fast for my Idaho-cultivated pace. I’ve signed the contract, the windows are going in, and Tony’s sending me interior decorating inspiration pictures throughout the day—it’s all really happening, and that means it’s really time for me to come clean with Cole. The longer I keep it a secret the worse it’s gonna be when he finds out, the deeper we’ll have embedded ourselves within each other, and the higher the chance of him discovering it himself, which would be a disaster (the location is only a few streets away, after all).

I need to tell him.

Now.

Except I can’t. I’ve managed to put it off this long by telling myself I’m just ‘waiting for the right opportunity,’ but I’m starting to wonder if there’s ever a ‘right’ time to tell your boss and lover that you’re betraying them. That you’re repaying their faith in you as a chef by leaving to start your own restaurant, and perhaps even worse than that, responding to the trust they’ve put into you as their lover by doing the one thing that emotionally scarred them permanently. Plus, every time I’m with Cole it’s like nothing else exists. I fall for him deeper each time we talk, with every intimate touch, every look from those eyes another knot that bonds us together. How can you do the right thing when it means hurting someone you love? How do you follow your dreams when it means giving up what you’ve worked so hard to build? I’ve spent nights sighing myself to sleep over it, praying for some intervention that’ll somehow make it better, some other way for this to go that might make everybody happy.

But maybe I’m wrong. Maybe he might not be upset, maybe he’ll appreciate that this is my dream, and that I couldn’t say no. Maybe being with him and working on my own place is absolutely fine. Except every time I think those things I remember the pain in his eyes when he told me about Jason betraying him, the vulnerability in them when he said he trusted me. That resolute defiance to never trust anybody ever again, to never open up to anybody—a defiance he gave up starting on our first night out, when he told me all his secrets.

I stand outside the closed office door, take a deep breath, and knock quickly.

“Come in,” Cole says through the door.

Here goes nothing.

“Hey,” I say, as I step into the office and Cole walks toward me, shoulders rolling, his body seeming even larger in the small room.

“Hey, babe,” he replies, shutting the door behind me and taking me in for a slow kiss, the kind he usually gives me first thing in the morning, as if thirsty for my lips. A kiss that makes time slow, turns my insides to warm honey. A drug that makes me lose my sense of place, struggle to catch my thoughts, as if they were passing birds.

He pulls back and smiles at me for a second, gazing at me as if I’m the most incredible thing on earth, so sincere I can almost believe it myself. Then he moves toward his desk.

I laugh nervously.

“We probably shouldn’t do that at work,” I say, just trying to shift the mood somewhere more pragmatic.

“Who cares? I’m the boss,” Cole says, leaning back to pull a bouquet from behind him. “I don’t like keeping secrets anyway.”

My stomach drops. I move closer to take the flowers from him and smell them.

“Flowers? Why…what are these for?”

“For being talented…smart…fascinating…and,” his hands wind around my hips, pulling me to him so that he almost crushes the flowers between us, “so incredibly sexy.”

I laugh and try not to make it obvious I’m pulling back, making as if I’m adjusting my whites.

“Also,” he continues, pulling a bottle of wine from nearby, wielding it the way he does when the wine is particularly good, “to celebrate.”

“Celebrate?”

Cole smiles even more broadly, and I can see the deep joy within him, the buildup of enthusiasm that led up to this moment. He doesn’t answer right away, as if savoring it, and instead scoots a chair beside me with his foot and leans back once again on the desk.

“You’re gonna wanna sit down for this,” he says, happily.

“Okay…” I say slowly, easing back into the chair, still clutching the flowers on my lap.

“You know Fork is on track to open in about five weeks, right?”

“Sure,” I nod.

“And that we were still looking for a head chef,” he goes on.

“Yeah. You found someone?”

“Better than that. I decided to move Michelle there. I just offered her the position about five minutes ago and she said yes. That does leave a spot open here, however…”

I experience the same kind of slow motion terror that I imagine car crash observers do. The rush of adrenaline, the prickle of fight-or-flight responses, the sensation of sheer, unavoidable helplessness that only exists in that moment after something has been set in irreversible motion, and the inevitable fate it’s going toward.

“Uh huh,” I mumble.

Cole pauses, drawing the moment out once again, his enjoyment of it—and his obliviousness to my discomfort—evident in the sparkle of those eyes.

“Willow. I want you to take the position. I want you to be the head chef here at Knife.”

After a long pause, I manage to unstick my vocal cords.

“Oh. Um. Wow.”

A crack in Cole’s smile appears when he sees my reaction, but it quickly repairs itself. He chuckles warmly.

“It’s a lot to take in, I get it. I didn’t really want to tell you at the start of a shift and give you no time to absorb it, but I couldn’t wait any longer.”

I drop my head in my hands, unable to look at him. “Cole…I just…”

“You deserve it though. You’ve been fantastic here since you started, you’ve got the raw talent and the drive, and to be honest, I should have thought of this ages ago. Would have saved myself a lot of trouble. Better late than never though.”

“Cole…wait…”

He kneels in front of me, and I look up into those darkly narrowed eyes, still sexy, as if he’s so unused to being happy he can’t quite smile without it seeming somewhat dark.

“You know, this could be the start of something incredible,” he says, his voice lower now that his face is so close to mine. “We could take this place to the next level. You were so right about those burgers—they brought the rest of the menu to life, balanced out all the serious dishes with something simple and low key. And your ideas about Fork… We work so well together. The way we challenge each other—”

“Cole, please…”

He takes my hands in his, too lost in the momentum of his own ideas to recognize the panicked look on my face for what it is.

“We could collaborate,” he says, eyes up now as if watching his dreams play out above my head. “I mean, Knife would still be a restaurant focused on French cuisine, but together we could put a twist on it, a stamp. Just think of what we could come up with together. My experience and your creativity.”

“No,” I manage to say, though I don’t say it forcefully.

Cole’s eyes look back at me, his smile dropping a little.

“Ok,” he says, standing up again and leaning back on the desk, “we don’t have to collaborate. Just an idea. You could just take the head chef position and carry it on as normal if you’re not comfortable doing more just yet. We can revisit—”

“No,” I say, this time with the heaviness it requires. “I mean, no to the job. I can’t be your head chef.”

Cole freezes, the glint in his eye dulling as he looks at me. “You can’t be serious. You really want to stay a line cook? You’re better than that and you know it. If you’re anxious we can take it one day at a time, have you move forward at your own pace—”

“No,” I say, my stomach dropping as I realize that this is it, that there’s no turning back. “I can’t be your line cook anymore either. I have to hand in my notice. You see I’m…well, I’m starting my own restaurant.”

Cole’s face hardens, his eyes squinting at me as if trying to read between the lines of what I just said. “You can’t be serious. You’re starting…your own restaurant?”

“Yes.”

I see his jaw shift a little as he grinds his teeth. “Why didn’t you say anything? How the hell did this come about? When did you even have time to—?”

I squirm on the chair a little, until I’m so uncomfortable I just stand up.

“Well…when I came to L.A. I…it’s complicated. I have this friend, right, and…look, forget the ‘how,’ the thing is—it’s happening. I didn’t think it would, but now it is, and it’s all been so crazy. We have investors and a location and we—”

“We?” Cole snorts, everything about him taut and angry now. “Who’s ‘we’?”

I take a deep breath, struggling to find the best route through this explanation.

“A friend. Tony, I think I mentioned him to you,” I say. The words come out sounding pathetic, too common and familial to reflect just how bad I feel, just how much I recognize the tragedy of what I’m doing to him.

Cole shakes his head and looks up, laughing darkly before he turns away, moving behind his desk as if he can’t stand not to have a barrier between us.

“Oh, this is too good,” he says, sarcasm and anger mixing in his voice.

“I didn’t want things to turn out like this,” I say, moving close to the desk now as if to keep him close. “It just happened so fast, it all got way out of—”

“Hold on,” Cole says, his smile grim and heavy now, as if clinging to his shred of irony in order to comprehend this. “So the night you came to my apartment, the night I made you that snack you liked, and you came back from a phone call with Tony all confused, leaving in a hurry…” Cole leans over the desk. “You knew then?”

“I…that wasn’t…”

Words fail me, every explanation I come up with sounding even more incriminating in my head. All I can do, finally, is nod.

Cole’s head drops, and for the first time I see the small, book-sized gift on the desk beside him, wrapped in pink paper and tied with a red ribbon. He raises his head again, eyes even darker now, even more distant.

“And when I took you to the beach,” he says, voice slow and thudding, as if he knows the answer already, “and I told you about how Jason betrayed me, scarred me so deep I couldn’t trust anybody else until I met you—” He stops himself to take a breath and find his words again. “And you sat there, all sympathetic and concerned, telling me it was a ‘lonely way to live’ and ‘so sad’ that I didn’t trust anyone. Did you know then?”

“Look, Cole, it’s not like that—”

“Did you know?”

He doesn’t shout, but the words are as powerful as bullets, impossible to ignore.

“Not really…I mean, kind of. It wasn’t really…” I wince and get frustrated with myself for not being able to express this. “It was just an idea…I didn’t think it would really happen. I mean, maybe in a few years or something, but never this soon. This is what I came out here for, though. It’s my dream. Aren’t you even…a little bit excited for me?”

I know even as the words come out that they’re the wrong thing to say. Cole drops himself back into his chair, muscles slumped, his fingers drumming on the table, as if impatient to see the back of me now. After a few tense moments where I mentally toss and turn to find the right words, the right angle on this whole situation, Cole lifts his hand and makes a tight fist, professional and guarded.

“You have a location already?”

“Yes.” I take a deep breath again, pausing before I have to deliver another hit, like a reluctant boxer. “It’s…a couple of streets away. On the way to Santa Monica from here.”

Cole closes his eyes.

“The corner building? The one that used to be a gallery?”

“Yeah,” I say quietly.

“So…” he says, looking at me again, “not only are you leaving me—you’re about to become my competitor.”

“No!” I say, unpersuasively. “Of course not. The food we’re going to make is completely different. And the whole vibe—”

“Knife is the best restaurant in L.A.,” he interrupts. “Anyone anywhere close to us wouldn’t bother with any other restaurant. Other places exist in our shadow. Except now you’re going to give them a choice to make. Because even though I feel like I don’t know really know you anymore, the one thing I do know is that you’re a killer chef.”

“Oh come on, Cole,” I say, starting to feel desperate, “it’s not like Knife is going to go out of business.”

Cole smiles, his expression like ice.

“Alright,” he says, drawing himself upright in his chair and pulling himself toward his desk. He picks up the wrapped gift and drops it in a drawer, sliding it shut forcefully. “I’ll have Martin reach out to go over your final paycheck with you—”

“Cole…”

“—and I’ll have someone come in to cover your shift today.” He pulls his phone from his pocket and gestures at the door, avoiding my eyes. “So if you wouldn’t mind.”

Suddenly, with all his walls back up, Cole becomes a stranger, somehow even more shut off from me than the first time I met him. “I’m sorry,” I whisper.

“Don’t apologize. You’re just following your dreams. I get it. I’ve trampled over people to get to where I am.”

I shake my head. “It’s not like that.”

“In this business, it’s always like that.” He stands. “You know your way out.”

I start to say something else, but the understanding that anything I say beyond this point is just another stab, another punch in the gut for both of us, stops me. Damage done, wounds raw, even being this close starts to hurt.

I turn my eyes away, and make for the door.

We’re over.