Page 9 of The Night We Lost Him

Jack was the chef.

“Hey, Nora,” he said, as if it had been twenty minutes since we last laid eyes on each other, as opposed to more than twenty years. The next day he found me online and sent a short message. Nice seeing you again. Let me know if you want to get some ice cream.

Now, I stand back and watch Jack work. He drizzles some Saba oil onto the crust of his signature pie, which he makes with this incredible strawberry sofrito sauce: a savory mix of garden-grown strawberries and San Marzano tomatoes, balsamic vinegar, onions, and pine nuts. He marinates the sauce for hours until it comes out tasting like the juiciest, richest, tangiest tomato sauce you’ve ever had.

It put Sheet Music on the foodie map less than two years after the restaurant’s soft opening, the pizza topping several notable food critics’ lists of must-try dishes.

Jack sends the strawberry pizza out for service. Then he looks up and spies me standing there and breaks into a smile. The smile that he reserves for just me: intimate and carnal and focused. How do I explain it? It always makes me feel like he can’t believe I’m his, two and a half years in, twenty-five years in. In the same way I can’t believe he’s mine.

I walk over, and he kisses me hello, his warm hand cupping the back of my neck, his breath against my lips. Steadying me. The way only he steadies me.

“I didn’t know you were coming in,” he says.

I close my eyes as I sink into his skin, take him in.

“You okay?” he asks.

“Maybe.”

He laughs. “Maybe isn’t great.”

“Sam Noone came to see me today.”

He pulls back and looks at me, confused. “Your brother?” he says. “What did he want?”

“Just to catch up, get a coffee… You know, tell me that he thinks someone may have killed our father.”

“What?”

I nod.

“Come with me,” he says.

He gently steers me toward his office, motioning to his chef de cuisine, Kayla, that he’ll be back. I lock eyes with her as we pass and try to give her an apologetic smile. The last thing she needs is me interrupting their dinner service. She turns back to her work, not even feigning a smile. She has been annoyed with me since Jack’s good friend from culinary school, Becker, asked him to come and run her restaurant—a two-star Michelin restaurant in Northern California—while she is on maternity leave. It is a position that, if he’d taken it, would have left Kayla in charge of Sheet Music while he was gone.

Even though I encouraged Jack to go, Kayla blames me that he decided against it.

I think of how absent I’ve been lately. And I wonder if she isn’t wrong.

Jack and I fall into lockstep as we walk into his small office. He closes the door behind us and turns to face me.

“What did he say exactly?”

“He’s convinced someone pushed him over the edge…”

He looks at me like that’s insane. It’s probably not all that differently from how I was looking at Sam a couple of hours ago. I wait for it to make me feel better—to climb into the comfort of this all being a far-fetched idea.

“Is there any reason to believe that?” he asks.

“Not really,” I say. “I mean, even if there are some threads I could pull at, my first instinct is that Sam has another agenda here. That this is a money play for him in some way. Or a power grab. Or I don’t know.”

“So why do you look like that?”

I shake my head. “I just also keep coming back to something else.”

“Which is?”

“Why did he choose to tell me?”

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