breaking eye contact with Ryan, and point to the kitchen. “What you just said back there changes nothing. And for the rest of the day, we will discuss nothing but food and menu items. Understand?”
He’s not threatened. He’s not shaking in his boots like I want him to. He wants to take my picture and post it with the hashtag cute. “Fine. Whatever you say, boss.”
And then his smile tilts, and I’m worried I’ll never be in control when it comes to Ryan.
Chapter Ten
Ryan
True to her word, June makes sure we never discuss anything personal all morning. She barely looks me in the eye. After scarfing her breakfast down and draining two cups of coffee, she fetches a pencil and notepad and taps the lead against the paper in a morse code that says let’s get this over with and then get out.
I’m not quite ready to comply yet, though. Instead, I feel like seeing how much I can learn about June without her realizing I’ve squeezed personal information from her. “Tell me about Darlin’ Donuts,” I say, and she narrows her eyes at me. I raise my hands in surrender. “It’s just a business question.”
June is skeptical as she searches my face for the hole in my lie. She can’t find it, though, so she gives in and spends the next twenty minutes talking non-stop. It’s ridiculously hard not to smile and give myself away as I watch her talk about her bakery.
Her eyes are lit up, and she smiles when she recounts to me the day they bought the shop and how it was filled with dead mice and rotting holes in the walls. Her brother, Jake, is an architect and helped her redesign the building, fitting it for a new industrial kitchen and shopfront with seating. She goes on and on about how they designed the bakery to look both vintage and modern, mixing bright pastel pinks, yellows, and turquoise with thick, intricate crown molding.
I listen and nod approvingly through the entire monologue, acting surprised when she tells me they have a peg wall behind the counter that spells out D. D. where they hang each of their signature donuts every day to showcase their flavors. I smile as if I didn’t already know about it. As if I don’t also know that her booths are tufted in a blue-green velvet and the floor is speckled marble. I have to act surprised so she doesn’t find out I’ve been secretly following the bakery’s Instagram account ever since Logan accidentally informed me about Darlin’ Donuts a few years ago.
I don’t actually follow her account or like or comment on any photos, so she has no way of knowing that I’ve been keeping up with her. But every night when I fall into bed, the first thing I do is type @DarlinDonuts into the Instagram search bar and stare at whatever photo she’s posted that day, hoping to see a glimpse of her face in every reflection.
I don’t tell her any of this for two reasons. 1) I don’t want her to hit me with a restraining order because she suddenly thinks I’m her stalker. 2) It sounds an awful lot like I’ve been pining away for her since high school—but honestly, I haven’t. I’ve been busy and content in my life, working so hard that I barely have time to think about anyone or anything but the career ladder I’ve been climbing. You don’t become the world’s youngest three-star Michelin chef by sitting on your butt and dreaming of a woman far away.
It’s only been in the last few years that I’ve thought about June again. Logan and Stacy visited me in Chicago, and Logan let the news of the bakery slip. Stacy kicked him under the table, and that was when I was first tipped off about the “no talking about June” policy. I didn’t press it in the moment. But I did manage to get the name of her bakery before Logan left, and I then proceeded to think about June every day for the next three years.
Actually, yeah, I do sound like a stalker. Great.
But the thing is, June has become a comfort to me from far away. An enigma. A figment of my imagination and someone that I’ve let myself dream of reuniting with for so long that I’ve been afraid to actually see her again. The more time that passed without me coming to visit, the more I talked myself out of ever