Page 5 of Devoured
I wasn’t aiming for anything specific. I just needed something that didn’t feel like failure. I wanted to be someone but at twenty-nine, working doubles just to pay rent, I wasn’t sure I had it in me.
One night, after closing, I was wiping down table six when Mr. Kurt leaned on his mop and said, “You ever think about being a manager? You’re good at running things. The way you handle the lunch rush, keep everyone working together.”
I looked up, rag frozen mid-swipe. “Me? A manager?”The laugh came out sharp, not believing it.
“You tell people what to do when it’s busy. Train the new servers without being asked. See problems before they happen.”He set the mop aside. “Community college has classes for restaurant management. Could lead to running a place like this. Or bigger. Hotels, even.”
“You’re not dumb, Zahra,”he added after a beat. “You just grew up in noise. There’s a difference. There’s no age for learning.”
That stuck with me. The way he said it. And the fact that he’d already looked into it.
Two weeks later, he’d brought in books about running restaurants, getting certificates, even hotel management programs. “Look, you already do this,”he said, pointing at work schedules I’d fixed. “You just don’t have the paper saying you can.”
I stayed after work most nights, studying with him. He’d ask me questions about managing people, show me the diner’s budget sheets.
Sometimes he made coffee and we’d sit in that cramped office, going over how to be a boss until the streetlights came on.
I actually thought I had a chance. That maybe I could be something more than a diner waitress pushing thirty.
Then Theo walked in.
He looked expensive. He sat at table seven, ordered the Grand Slam with extra bacon, and smiled at me when I poured his coffee.
The next day, he asked for me again.
The day after that, he left his business card folded under the receipt with a fifty-dollar tip. Theodore Quinn, Attorney at Law. Beneath it, in neat blue ink: Let me take you to dinner. A real one.
I met him a few days later at a restaurant where the napkins were cloth and the water came with lemon slices. He shook my hand like he was sealing a deal. He ordered my drink for me—some white wine I didn’t know how to pronounce—and told me I had sad eyes. Brushed the tip of his thumb under my left one. Said, “Let me fix that.”
I didn’t know then what I know now—that men don’t say things like that unless they already see you as broken. Unless they’re shopping for something they can shape.
Six months later, I was wearing a dress that cost more than anything I’d ever owned, walking down an aisle in heels that pinched my toes until they went numb. Annie sat in the third pew, dabbing at her eyes with a handkerchief.
“You did it,”she whispered when I passed. “You finally found someone who sees you.”
Mr. Kurt came too. When he hugged me afterward, he told me quietly, “If you’re happy, I’m happy. But you have so much potential. Don’t forget about those studies after all this settles down.”
I promised him I wouldn’t. I meant it then.
But life had other plans.
Theo expected a perfect housewife. He’d get mad over small things—the dishes not stacked right, the laundry folded the wrong way. But he always apologized afterward. Said he was tired. Said he didn’t mean it.
I knew he looked up to his mother. He was an only son, raised like something delicate, and he wanted everything to look perfect. Be perfect. Feel perfect.
But as the years passed, I started to see it. Theo wasn’t just difficult. There was more to himthan I let myself believe.
∞∞∞
I was lying in the hospital after my first miscarriage when his mask completely slipped.
“You lost the baby because of your weight, Zahra,”he said, digging his nails into my arm. “If you weren’t so fat, maybe our child would have lived.”
The cruelty was so casual, like he’d been thinking it the whole time I was bleeding and just decided to finally say it out loud.
After that, everything changed.
He’d wanted a child—an heir, really. Someone to carry on the Quinn name. Now he looked at me like I was defective merchandise he couldn’t return.
