twenty-six
By the time James unlocked the door to his penthouse, Jean-Luc was already prepping dinner. We could hear his knife work from the foyer. James called out a greeting to him as I slipped off my shoes at the door, and then he turned to me.
“Follow.” He took off down the hallway, pausing only for a quick introduction as we passed the kitchen. Jean-Luc looked up from a cutting board and nodded quickly.
“Bonsoir, mademoiselle,” he said, and returned his attention immediately to a pile of calamari.
“Not a talker,” James said quietly as he steered me to the back of the apartment and the master suite. “But I much prefer wordlessness and outstanding food to unsalted borscht.” He opened a closet at the end of the hallway and threw a plush white hand towel at me. I caught it to my chest and inhaled its freshly laundered scent. I knew from his own admission James did not know how to do his own laundry and never had, following a long tradition enjoyed by generational wealth. His mother, he’d once told me, had brought a maid with her to Smith when she was a college girl. She’d boarded her off campus and continued the perks of having her laundry washed and folded, her dresses and blouses pressed, and shopping and errands efficiently performed by a professional, even as she discussed Shakespeare and world history in the hallowed halls of academia.
I excused myself to the restroom to freshen up before dinner. As I reapplied my makeup, I started to hum, pleased that I could feel the dynamic between the two of us shifting this time around. We were on the equal playing field I’d so wanted the first time we’d tiptoed into getting to know each other. No uneasy work-life separations because we would be copiloting this time. I was just as likely as he was to go dark for days, intent on my work, and he would understand that in a way that other people might not. I closed my eyes, shoving out my thoughts of “other people.” Tucker had made his choice, I reminded myself again. And I’d made mine. It was time to move on.
When I opened the door to the restroom, the smells coming from the kitchen washed over me. Infinitely better than any slice of pizza I would have nabbed on my walk back to my apartment, Jean-Luc was performing marvels on the six-burner Viking stove.
James opened his arm toward the French doors leading to the balcony and said, “Shall we?”
I followed him to the terrace and a sweeping view of the park and the city beyond. We leaned against the stately brick railing, sipping our wine and watching as the park grew dark and the lights of the city dotted the landscape, rushing to meet the falling night. I took a step back and surveyed the terrace with appreciation.
“James, this is so beautiful with everything in bloom. All the color and the smell of these herbs.” I pinched off a basil leaf and raised it to my nose, then popped it into my mouth. “You are a lucky man.”
He nodded slowly, eyes on me. “That’s absolutely true.” He smiled and raised his glass. Walking to the patio table and the waiting bottle, he spoke as he poured. “This really is a great place. Killer view. Something of a tragedy, though, that I don’t spend more time out here. I think this is the first, maybe second time this summer that I’ve eaten on the terrace. Jean-Luc sounded stunned when I suggested it.” He winked, just as the chef himself appeared, bearing two beautifully plated appetizers.
“For your pleasure,” he said in a thick French cadence, “a sauté of calamari and shrimp, dressed with garlic, coriander, cardamom, and mint, finished with lemon zest. That you may enjoy.” He leaned over the table and placed each dish carefully at the two place settings before bowing slightly and hurrying back to the kitchen.
“That was the most words I’ve heard him say at one time,” James said quietly as he pulled out my chair. “I think he has a crush on my date.” He leaned over me from behind and kissed me chastely on the cheek.
I smiled as he sat down. “A man of impeccable taste, then.” I speared a beautifully crisped ring of calamari and didn’t even wait for James to respond before murmuring with fresh-catch pleasure. “This is delicious,” I said, putting a shrimp on the end of my fork and feeling another rush of happiness as I bit into the morsel. I shook my head and waited to finish chewing. “I think I’m the one who has a crush on Jean-Luc.”
And that was just the first course. The steak-and-tomato salad, with tarragon from James’s herb garden, sang of summer, and I told Jean-Luc just that. My words made him blush as he set down a basket of his fresh-made ciabatta, and James raised his eyebrows in amusement. “Now he’s just showing off,” he said, but he broke the bread with his hands and slathered on chilled salted butter, and I noted he might want me to eat there more often, if Jean-Luc had this kind of reaction.
James laughed. “True enough,” he agreed, “though if things at Flyover keep moving in the direction and at the speed they are currently headed, I don’t think you’ll have any more free evenings for terrace dining than I have.”
I frowned, and he tore off another piece of bread as he continued. “Don’t worry that pretty head,” he said, bemused. “You’ll be seeing plenty of other breathtaking views.”
I listened as he described the upcoming travel he was booking for us as we followed the plan of expansion. An industry friend in Paris had asked us to visit before the end of fall, James had a contact in Milan who was itching for samples, he said, and a stop in London had already been booked. I thanked Jean-Luc for the slice of raspberry crème fraîche tart that he slid in front of me, and took a deep breath in, letting it out slowly. My parents and I had always dreamed of going to Paris together after my high school graduation.
“Wow,” I breathed. “I’ve never been to Paris.”
“You will love it,” James said with a smile. “It’s very romantic.”
James pushed away from the table and came to stand in front of me. He held out his hand. “The City of Love and all that,” he said, and pulled me to my feet. “Now I want to make something very clear.” I stood inches away, but he didn’t take a step back. My breath caught as I stared into his startling blue eyes. He drew even closer to me, his hands tight around my waist. He leaned down and kissed me. It was earnest, intense. I pulled back to catch my breath and searched his face, my thoughts spinning. A smile broke from my lips.
“Who would have thought,” I said quietly, “that the whole reason I’m standing here again is because of a group of sweet little old ladies sewing their hearts out in a converted barn?”
Something flickered across James’s face, and he stepped deftly out of our embrace and back to his side of the table. I watched him, wondering if I’d said something wrong, and when he daintily speared his first bite of tart, he answered my internal questions.
“Grace, you know the granny thing will need to stop, right?” He took a sip of water.
I stared, still standing where he’d left me. “What do you mean?”
“I mean,” he said slowly, “that we love the grannies. We love the idea of the grannies. But when it comes down to logistics, the grannies can’t keep up.”
I could feel my pulse rate start to climb. “I know there are some challenges,” I said quickly, “but I’ve thought a lot about it and I know how to keep production in Iowa.”
James’s smile was pitying. “Grace, it will never work. The investment in human capital is outrageous if we keep production in the Midwest. That’s why things aren’t produced in the Midwest. The Midwest is”—he paused, a sad smile forming—“well, flyover country.”
I could feel my blood start to boil. “What are you saying?” My voice had raised and I saw Jean-Luc pass by the soaring patio doors and look outside, concern on his face.
“I’m saying the grannies were the perfect start, and I’ve kept them in the business as long as I could, but they are simply not sustainable. You had to know that.” He waited a moment for me to agree but saw only my fixed stare and set jaw. Hurrying the conversation onward, he put up his hands in surrender. “I know they were important to you, but we have to do what’s best for Saffron. And Flyover. You have the next level to think about. The decision is between India or China. You pick.” He kept eating his blasted tart, and I gripped the chair in front of me, worried I might just pick up the tart and fling it over the terrace wall to an unceremonious demise on the pavement ten stories below.
“No,” I said, shrugging slightly, righteous anger giving my words momentum. “Production stays in Iowa.”
James let out a short bark of a laugh. “Grace, calm down.”
“Do not tell me to calm down,” I said through gritted teeth. “I have worked too long and too hard for this for you to ruin it by cutting corners.”
He pushed back his chair from the table and studied me, hands slowly folding his linen napkin into a tidy square. “I’m sorry to disappoint you.”
“Well, it’s not the first time,” I said. I could feel the anger flushing my cheeks.
“Hey, now,” he said, and I hated it that he remained so calm, amused even. “No need to get personal.”
“This is personal. That’s the whole point, James. This is incredibly personal. The women in Silver Creek are real people with real dreams and real families and real bills to pay. They believed in this crazy idea long before you came on board.” I was breathing heavily by that point, and I paused to catch my breath before continuing, forcing myself to use a more measured tone. “I can’t move production overseas. I won’t.”
“You can and you will,” he said with a dismissive shrug. “Perhaps you’re forgetting the contract you signed?”
“That contract was a non-compete, a first draft of a larger contract that I have never seen.” I narrowed my eyes at him, feeling the adrenaline pulse in my fingertips.
“I’m afraid that’s not exactly true,” James said. “Consult your copy, but I think you’ll find that it’s pretty airtight. The ideas, the samples, the relationships with all buyers, Hedda included—those all belong to Saffron, the parent company of Flyover. You may choose to leave, but the rest of it stays. Including decisions of where we continue production.”
The terrace, the lights strung in its potted trees, the view of the city, it all swam in my vision, and I grabbed my bag that sat on a nearby patio couch. “I can’t be here anymore,” I said, stumbling away from the table as the weight and truth of James’s words made a tangled mess of my thoughts. I hurried past Jean-Luc and into the living room, my only focus the front door, the atrium, the elevator, the world outside of this room. Somewhere in my brain, I registered the plush white rug that greeted my bare feet as I made my way to the door and my shoes. The feeling made me shudder, remembering a cavalier story of the afternoon James had purchased that rug and spent more than my entire first year’s salary from Milano on a stupid piece of carpet. I stopped suddenly, feeling the calamari, the steak, the shrimp that I’d just devoured take a sharp and nasty turn in my stomach. I paused, my hand on the back of James’s white leather sofa, my feet rooted to their spots on the carpet. I closed my eyes as the room continued to spin, and I felt sweat form on the back of my neck.
“Are you all right?” James said from his stance in the doorway.
I waited for the nausea to pass, eyes still closed. I saw Gigi, her bright smile as she directed the sewing women in the barn. I saw Goldie, writing a check to her nephew as seed money for his new hardware store. I saw Tucker, his eyes finding mine from across the barn as he placed a Ball jar of flowers on my worktable.
I knew James was nearer to me and I willed him not to do it, but he placed a cool hand on my arm and said, “Gracie?”
“Don’t call me that,” I said, right before emptying the contents of my stomach all over his fifty-thousand-dollar rug.