Page 53 of From Paris, with Butter
Laurent flushed scarlet. “How do you know that?”
Now I was blushing, too. “Some women were gossiping about it at the first gala meeting.”
Laurent dropped his head. “Yes. They’re correct.”
“But why would Sabine hate you when her sister cheated on you?”
Laurent sighed. “I’ll explain, but let me warn you that this period was me at my absolute lowest. I don’t expect you to be impressed.”
I stayed silent as he gathered himself.
“You know how hard it can be to run a restaurant?” Laurent finally said. “When I was running Les Champs D’Or, I couldn’t handle the thought of it failing. Whenever anything went wrong, I’d throw all my energy into fixing it so I wouldn’t lose this dream I’d fought so hard for.”
Laurent’s mouth twisted. “It meant giving up a lot of things. I stopped seeing friends. I couldn’t be bothered to have Sunday dinner with my parents. My girlfriend and I had recently moved in together, but we barely saw each other. She begged me to spend time with her, but the restaurant always came first. I was so consumed with work I can hardly blame her for cheating on me. I’m sure she told Sabine just how thoroughly I’d abandoned her. When she left me, I thought that was my rock bottom.”
Laurent glanced at me, then suddenly away. It was such a guilty gesture, like something a child would do.
“It gets worse. Things started to fall apart at the restaurant. Profits were slipping, one of my sous chefs spiraled and had to go to rehab, the owners were on me to try this new trend, then that one. At the same time, Noelle was diagnosed with cancer. Ewing sarcoma, cancer in her bones.” Laurent looked exhausted. He looked a hundred years old.
“That should have been my sign to pull back and spend time with my sister. But I couldn’t. The thought of losing my restaurant was unbearable. It would mean everything I’d worked so hard for had failed. ThatIwas a failure.
“So I just dove in deeper. It got so bad I cut myself off from everyone and spent most nights sleeping on a cot in the kitchens. And all the while my sister was wasting away, bent double in pain, spending her days in hospitals.”
Laurent looked at me, and his eyes were full of tears. “I’m so ashamed of that time in my life. I blocked everything out and focused only on the tiny aspects of life that I could control.”
My heart hurt for him. The quirks I’d noticed: his spotless apartment, the need for everything to be neat and organized, his perfectly-pressed clothes…They were all an attempt to find order in a life that had spun into chaos.
“I hate myself for it,” Laurent said quietly, a tear rolling down his face. “My sister gets cancer, and I reorganize my spice rack.”
“People react to grief in strange ways,” I said gently. “The afternoon after my mother’s funeral, I went to a department store and spent five hundred euros on a vase. For some reason, I thought it would ease the overwhelming sadness I was feeling.”
Laurent wiped his eyes. “I know. And I lost the restaurant anyway. It wasn’t turning the profit the owners wanted, so they closed it down. I wrecked all those relationships for nothing.
“The morning that I went home and apologized to my family for everything, Noelle had been stuck inside for days and was desperate to get out of the house. I offered to drive her anywhere she wanted. Do you know what we did?”
“What?” I whispered.
Laurent’s face softened. “We went to an ice cream shop. She ordered chocolate in a waffle cone, and I got pistachio. Her immune system was still weak, and it made me nervous for her to be around people, so I drove us out into the middle of nowhere, where there were only farms nearby. All the canola fields were in bloom. Watching Noelle lick her ice cream and laugh as it dripped down her hands, I realized that even when your life has an enormous hole ripped through it, it’s still beautiful. It’s still so full of beauty. When you dropped into my life and gave me those delicious, squashed macarons, I knew you would only add to that beauty.”
Laurent’s face was glazed with tears, but he still smiled. “Don’t worry about Sabine. She has it in for me, and I’m sure she recognized from the start how captivated I was by you. So now she has it in for you, too. She’s just blowing hotair.
“I’ve talked to Fatima; I know she’s impressed by your baking skills. As she should be,” Laurent added, grinning. “I’m not exaggerating when I say that, if you ever went to pastry school, you’d amaze them.”
I’d just managed to regain a tiny bit of composure, but that comment sent me spiraling.
“Wait, what did I say?” Laurent asked as my face crumpled.
I slumped back into my seat. Minerva, still in my lap, raised her head in disapproval.
“I did go to pastry school,” I sighed. “I wasn’t good enough for it. I was so bad they kicked me out.”
There. The biggest shame of my life, out in the open. I had no idea this random Thursday evening would result in Laurent and I sharing our deepest failures.
“They kicked you out?” Laurent sounded completely nonplussed. “Margot, you’re incredible at baking, though. How long ago was this?”
I took a few slow breaths, trying to steady myself. “I guess it’s been six years now.” I wiped a hand across my eyes. “All I ever wanted to do was become a pastry chef, like my mother. She’d saved up money for so long so I could go. She was so proud when I got into the same pastry school she’d gone to.”
Keep going,I told myself.
