It wasn’t.

But no. He was out on his own, doing a job he didn’t even know if he was suited for. It was all right for Flora, he thought. Her life had worked out absolutely fine. She had her boyfriend, had a baby, had the house even. Fintan couldn’t bear to live in his mansion, had made Flora rent it. But he still resented them being there. He wanted it bricked up like a shrine, kept exactly how it had been when they had been in love, with nobody else walking through it, no babies laughing or fires crackling. Every time Flora changed something, he winced. Flora, aware of this, tried to tiptoe around the place, so as a result, nobody was particularly happy with the arrangement.

He arrived at the large red sandstone building. Happy Hospitality was the name of the company. He snorted to himself. Whatever.

Chapter 7

T he young recruiting agent was pretty and enthusiastic.

“Well!” she said. “You are quite the conundrum! Lots of our chefs want to work with their own kitchen . . .”

Fintan stared ahead stonily, ignoring the cup of coffee the receptionist had brought him.

“. . . but the location is quite . . .”

“It’s far away, aye,” he said shortly. “It comes with accommodation.”

“Yes, but often people aren’t sure whether they want to uproot their entire lives . . .”

“Is that so?”

“But we do have a few people for you to meet!”

The woman smiled brightly and buzzed in the first person, a morose bearded man with a bright red nose and trembling hands. Fintan internally sighed. He had thought that recruiting a chef to a state-of-the-art kitchen, with a mandate to build a creative menu using whatever local ingredients he or she wanted to source, would be enticement enough. Mure had an embarrassment of riches in that regard: shellfish—oysters, lobsters, and crayfish—all pulled from the ice-cold water each morning; rich green vegetables that kept their flavor from the soil; samphire glistening like emeralds along the wide beaches; careful crops of wild mushroom; venison from the mainland, rich and dark as chocolate; elderberry and juniper gin, distilled on the island; rhubarb to beat the band.

As well as luxury accommodation on a beautiful island . . . He’d thought it would be a dream come true. But now, in the city, burnout followed burnout: old chefs who’d seen it all; tourist hoteliers, whose limit was scampi and chips or chicken in a basket. Time-servers and bedraggled kitchen casualties who he wasn’t entirely sure just weren’t after the free room and board. Being a chef was a punishingly difficult career, with high rates of drink and drug taking. Not everyone got out of it unscathed. And the people Happy Hospitality had lined up for him were hardly the cream of the crop.

He’d hoped he might find someone with as much passion as he had, who could see the amazing potential of the little island at the top of the world. But he sat through interview after interview with little light. The idea was that he would talk to everyone, then the ones whom he liked would cook something in the kitchen set up in the offices. But so far he wouldn’t let anyone he’d met make him so much as a sandwich.