mad.
“Imagine my surprise”—taptaptaptaptap, taptaptaptaptap—“when he told me he’d been fired.”
Lexi’s heart did some tapping of its own. “I didn’t fire him. I merely changed the timeline.” To sometime in the unforeseeable future.
“Yeah, well, you should have told me! I’m not only the designer, Lex, I’m your friend. We used to share everything.”
Talk about laying on the guilt, Lexi thought. She and Abby had met the first day of freshman year when Abby stuck a wad of grape gum in her hair because Lance Burton had offered to walk Lexi to second period. Lexi cut out the gum, stuck it to Abby’s chair and consequently the butt of her designer skirt, exposing a side of the DeLuca Darling that wasn’t so darling or demure and landing them both in the principal’s office. Two weeks of detention later, they were as close as sisters—and they sometimes still fought like ones.
“As for Hard-Hammer Tanner, I think he was afraid you fired him because he was a man,” Abby added.
“A man?”
“As in single, potential date material. Or in your case, potential blind date, fixed up by grandmother, unwanted-bachelor material.”
“Oh God,” Lexi groaned, sticking her finger into a fruit tart and licking off the filling. She was so pathetic that she couldn’t even fire a man without people thinking it was about dating.
“So, you want to explain how you went from kicking Jeffery’s ass to putting the bistro on hold?”
Lexi shook her head.
“God, he can’t even get his cake to rise. There’s no way he can claim those recipes are his,” Abby fumed.
“Jeffery never claimed that he created anything. He argued that a menu is a crucial asset to any restaurant. And since the restaurant was only ever in his name and I never executed an agreement stating exactly what I was bringing into the business and therefore could take with me when I left, the judge agreed.”
“Bullshit! Contract or not, you were the reason that restaurant was a success.”
“No, my menu was the reason it was a success.” It was the main reason she had decided to not fight him for the recipes.
The past few months had been filled with several difficult realizations. For one, Lexi was embarrassed at just how trusting and stupid she’d been in assuming that “to honor and cherish” extended to all aspects of her and Jeffery’s marriage. When they’d opened Pairing, he’d only put his and his mother’s names on the papers, claiming that it was his mother’s equity that afforded them to open the doors, and promising that when they could stand on their own he’d replace his mother’s name with Lexi’s. God, if that hadn’t been a sign to run, she didn’t know what was.
Time and again he’d discounted the amount of sweat equity Lexi had put into making their restaurant a success—or that she was supposed to be the Mrs. Balldinger in his life. Yes, his last name should have been another red flag. Instead of pressing the issue for her name to be added to a silly piece of paper, she’d naively assumed the marriage certificate was enough, and, not wanting to risk a confrontation in an already stressful time, she had nodded politely, thrown herself into creating the best menu on the West Side, and sat back while Jeffery made one bad decision after another. The worst being a year ago, when the restaurant began to struggle and she’d agreed to borrow a significant amount of money from Pricilla.
When she lost the restaurant, it was as though she had lost a part of herself, the part that made her fearless in the kitchen. That she couldn’t pay Pricilla back only made the situation worse.
“So you aren’t going to fight him?”
“And risk Pairing going under? No way. I mean, I lost the menu and it sucks, but if Jeffery lost the restaurant he would default on the loan and Grandma would lose everything.”
“I thought you paid off the loan.”
“The equity from the house wasn’t enough because Jeffery insisted on going with the bigger meat supplier and nearly sank us.”
“Imagine that,” Abby said, rolling her eyes. “Jeff suffering from meat envy.”
Yet another ongoing problem for her ex. But this time his need to measure up nearly put Pairing out of business. Insisting that to become a five-star eatery they had to act like a five-star eatery, Jeffery ignored that the fake-it-till-you-make-it theory had never really gone well for them and dumped their local meat supplier to go with a larger, more prestigious one.
Bo Brock’s meat man,