The Lost Recipe for Happiness - By Barbara O'Neal Page 0,101

each other!—had been youth. They had been young together, and free, and full of adventure. She would like to find him and find out if those Greek island adventures, those Spanish beaches, had shaped him as much as they’d shaped her.

But perhaps his biggest gift to her had been what came after. Heartbroken and unwilling to even date anyone else for nearly two years, Elena flung herself into cooking, moved to New York, devoted herself entirely to study, to understanding and incorporating everything she’d been picking up here and there, in this restaurant and that café, from this cuisine and that open fire. In New York, she met Marie, the spice lady, and stumbled into the pleasure of working for a famous and demanding and obnoxious chef who did his best to break her; when she didn’t break, he promoted her. For three years, she had allowed men into her bed as required, but none had made it past the walls of her heart.

When she was not quite thirty, she moved to San Francisco and landed a sous-chef position, where she met Andrew, her redheaded Australian, whom she loved for the next two years. That was when her career had taken first place, finally. After Andrew had been her bluesman, and then she met Dmitri at Julian’s San Francisco restaurant, the Yellow Dolphin.

Dmitri.

At first, it had been strictly a working relationship. They worked brilliantly together, their work styles and visions of the food complementing and expanding the other’s. He’d been promoted to executive after the original chef departed, and when he was offered the development opportunity at the Blue Turtle, he’d leapt at the chance. He and Elena had worked hard.

Funny, she thought now, carrying a second cup of coffee upstairs. Julian must have been around some during the opening of the Blue Turtle, but she’d never met him—and really, that was hardly unusual. Owners were owners. They didn’t necessarily get involved in the details, especially to the level that Julian had been involved in the Orange Bear. He was here in Aspen for other reasons. The restaurant gave him something to do.

When she had to give up Julian, what would she recall?

His closet, as big as the room she had shared with three sisters, lined with elegant clothing, a top hat and tails in white and black, and designer suits and linen shirts and cotton shirts and drawers with socks lined up by fabric and color and style. Black silk for fancy dress. Running socks with little numbers on the ankles. Acres of shoes, running shoes and patent leather and boots so old and worn that Elena couldn’t begin to guess their age.

Running her fingers along the sleeves hanging down in the closet, she thought she might remember the small vulnerabilities about him. He was older than she by quite a bit. He wouldn’t say, and although she could look it up, she didn’t. It was a subject too tender—why tease him that way when he was so kind to her? But when he was sleeping, she could see threads of purest silver weaving through the curls. On his head and below, too. Only a few, here and there. When the light was full on his face, she could see that the skin on his throat was going just the barest bit thin. Just the barest bit. He sometimes limped a little upon rising in the morning, his feet sore from being still.

With her arms over her chest, she went to stand by the window—a window in a closet!—and recognized the hollowness in her belly for what it was. Love. And not even a wild, rushing, insane river of it, but something quieter, deeper, finer. Steady, like a flame. If she believed, she would say that here, in this man, she really had found a soul mate.

If she believed.

But that was a foolishness reserved for the young and yet-to-be disillusioned. The facts were sobering. He’d been divorced four times. She’d had six long relationships. They knew these things didn’t last, and in this case, with a man so famous, a man who wielded power and faced the endless, endless temptation of women all day, every day, well…what chance did they have?

None, really. Not for the long term.

But maybe that was the secret of happiness—not expecting any one thing to last forever. Maybe, instead of borrowing trouble from the future, she could just stay in this world, in this moment, and enjoy what fruits there were here. Love him for