Page 99 of The Arrogant One
I waited until Walker finished reading, and the excitement between him, Colson, and Eden began to die down before I said, “Walker, will you take a look at the photos?”
“I already did,” he replied, his brows rising higher, the longer he gazed at me. “What’s the problem with them?”
“There’s no problem. I’m just curious about the plate that’s next to the tuna and burrata.” I turned my phone, attempting to see if a different view would help identify what I was looking at. “What the hell is on it?”
The room turned silent.
“A bread plate?” Eden offered. “Maybe?”
“I don’t think so,” I told her. “It’s too large, and that doesn’t look like a slice of bread.”
Colson thumped his hand on the table. “Could it be an extra appetizer plate? A chunk of the bread sitting on it? A bite of a shrimp?”
I exhaled. “She didn’t say she got shrimp.”
“She’s not required to list everything she ordered,” Colson said.
“No, she’s not, but she normally does,” I told him. “There are times she orders ten things. So, why would she leave out shrimp if it’s something she got?”
I analyzed the other photos, and the mystery plate wasn’t present during the main course. The center of the table was filled with our one-pound baked potato, our lobster macaroni and cheese, and our sautéed wild mushroom medley. Which meant the server had cleared the appetizer plates, just the way they were supposed to between courses.
But that didn’t explain the photo with the unidentifiable fucking plate.
“God, the way she blurred it out is making it so hard to tell,” Eden said. She was turning her phone the same way I was.
“Why would she blur something out?” I pushed my chair back and set my phone on the edge of the table. “Normally, she crops the picture, she doesn’t blur.”
Beck pointed at his phone. “She couldn’t crop it. It would have cut off the side of the tuna.”
“Maybe she dropped something on the plate, and it wasn’t photo-friendly?” Eden set her phone down. “Whatever it was, it wasn’t aesthetically pleasing, so she made it too fuzzy to see. That’s my guess.”
I shook my head. “What would she drop? The blob looks white-ish. What do we have that’s white?”
“Butter,” Beck suggested.
“A giant wad of gum,” Colson offered.
“Gum?” I asked.
Colson laughed. “My kid is notorious for doing that.”
I ran my hand over the top of my head. “It’s not fucking gum—I can tell you that right now.”
“Then, what is it?” Walker pressed.
“Holy shit,” Eden voiced. “Will you all stop talking about the white blob and pull up our reservation app and look at the numbers that are coming in? Every time I refresh, they go up by at least a hundred more reservations.”
“A hundred!” Walker yelled. “You’re telling me we’re getting a hundred more reservations by the second?”
“Across all of our locations, and, yes, that’s what I’m telling you,” Eden said.
Walker pounded his fist on the table. “Dear Foodie, I fucking love you.”
He didnow.
But we still had to get through Toro’s review, and I was doing everything in my power to make sure that review was going to happen.
I took a screenshot of the photo and saved it on my phone and replied, “I’m going to show this to our sous chef and see what she says. Whatever I have to do, I’m going to get to the bottom of the white blob.”
