The tables, the chairs, the custom booths and polished cherry bar, the cut crystal glasses, the trio of art deco chandeliers by the entrance that cost $17,500 a pop. Whatever didn’t go up in flames was hosed with what must have been fifteen hundred gallons of water. It’s like standing in a flooded ashtray.

“I meant with Jade,” Flavio says, swiping a hand down his dark beard. Like most men in the restaurant business, he gives his facial hair free rein—the bushier, the better. I used to complain, but these days hell if I care. “That’s who you were talking to earlier, right?”

“Oh. Yeah, some creep’s been following her around town, but let’s tackle one disaster at a time. What the hell happened here? How did it get this bad?”

“Apparently, the noise panels were highly flammable.” He points to a spot high on the wall to the kitchen, where the first in a web of panels is now a black, smoky blur. “The flames hit that one and poof. The whole ceiling was gone in a matter of minutes.”

I stare at the maze of tangled wires and smoke-blackened insulation that runs along the spine of the building, most of it burned away. The stench, a combination of charred wood and melted plastic, sears like acid in the back of my throat, the inside of my nose, my lungs.

My best moneymaker gone. One hundred and thirteen employees out of a job. Millions of dollars turned to ash.

Flavio kicks a chunk of something aside, burnt wood scraping over glass and stone, a sound I feel in my bones. This place was his main source of income, too.

My chest tightens with a familiar weight. What kind of cocky idiot opens a fifth restaurant when the other four aren’t paid off? What was I thinking, taking on responsibility for all those people? Flavio watches me, waiting for a response, and I have no clue what to say. That I never should have given him a job? That only a fool would trust me with their livelihood? I swallow and turn away.

At the front of the shop, two women with blowouts and shocked expressions peer through what’s left of the plate-glass window. Thanks to the location in the middle of Buckhead’s swankiest shopping district, these ladies are our typical daytime diners. They order hundred-dollar bottles of wine and steak salads they barely touch, and they come in such droves there’s a two-week wait for a 12:30 table.

Scratch that—was a two-week wait.