Page 4 of Triplet Babies for Pucking Christmas

And now I’m the chef who poisoned everyone at a celebrity Christmas wedding.

Fuck.

Chapter One

Savannah

The fallout is immediate.

By the next morning, the entire internet knows what happened. It’s everywhere. Twitter, Instagram, TikTok.

My name is trending for all the wrong reasons.

Every headline screams the same thing:Celebrity Holiday Wedding Catering Disaster! Food Poisoning Scandal Rocks Hollywood! A Not-So-Merry Christmas for This Couple!

And then there’s the memes. Oh, God, the memes.

They’ve dubbed me“Salmonella Savannah”.

My face—my fuckingface—is plastered on every meme, every joke, every viral tweet. Pictures of Olivia Harper looking pale and miserable, of guests puking into bushes, all with captions like, “Hope you enjoy yourlast supper,” and “Eat at Lemons? No thanks, I prefer to live.”

I want to die. I want to crawl into a hole and never come out.

But it gets worse. So much worse.

Lemons is done. Finished. No one wants to eat at a restaurant run by the woman who gave half of Hollywood food poisoning.

Investors pull out. Reservations are canceled. Layla, my best friend, mybusiness partner, sits me down a few days later and drops the bomb.

“I’m buying you out.”

I stare at her, my mouth hanging open. “What?”

She looks uncomfortable, like she doesn’t want to be saying this, but she’s doing it anyway. “Sav, I’m sorry. I really am. But this...this is bad. I’ve been talking to the investors, and they don’t think we can recover from this. The only way to save Lemons is if I take full control.”

I feel like I’ve been punched in the stomach. “You’re getting rid of me?”

“I’m not getting rid of you,” she says quickly. “But we have to think about the future. I’ll make sure you’re taken care of, okay? But...I need to buy you out. It’s the only way.”

I stare at her, my eyes burning with unshed tears. “You’re serious.”

She nods. “I’m sorry, Sav. But this is the only way.”

I stand up, my chair scraping loudly against the floor. “Fuck you.”

“Sav…”

“No,” I snap. “Fuck you, Layla. You’re just going to...what, take everything we built together and throw me out like trash?”

“I’mtryingto save what we built,” she argues, her voice rising. “This isn’t personal. This is business.”

“Business?” I laugh bitterly. “Fuck business. I thought we were friends.”

“We’re friends,” she says, her voice softening. “But I have to do what’s best for the restaurant.”

I shake my head, my throat tight. “What about me? What about everything I’ve worked for? You’re just going to cut me out like I’m nothing?”

Her face crumples, but she doesn’t say anything. She doesn’t have to.

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