“You’re here because you want to be on the show,” he states, flatly.

“I’m here because I don’t want you to think I expect you to get us on the show.”

He nods. “Noted. Thank you.”

A man with brown skin and white-framed glasses sits at the table beside us. His outerwear spills over the booth toward me. As a unit, Paul and I turn our knees away, leaning closer to keep the rest of the world out.

“What’s Camilla like?” I trace the rim of my mug with my index finger. My hands have lost a lot of fights with knives and they look like it, but the good thing about surrounding myself with people like Amy and Paul is they see it as a sign of success, of lessons learned and skills earned.

He frowns. “She’s...well, she’s...a great chef.” A blush rises under his short beard. “Very professional.”

The urge to tease him about that blush and his close proximity to culinary royalty tickles the back of my throat but I swallow it down. “She’s a hero of mine. She’s done so much.”

“Mine too.”

“You said you already knew about my application...”

Paul hums noncommittally.

“The producers are considering it?”

He sighs, smiling. “You know I can’t tell you that.”

“I know. I’m assuming they’re going to play up the connection between us.”

He laughs. “Are you already strategizing?”

“No, of course not.”

“You’ve always been so good on camera. I was hoping that maybe you’d given thought to returning to television more permanently.” Paul speaks slowly, quietly, choosing his words carefully and not quite meeting my eyes.

I can’t keep the cringe off my face. “This will be a onetime thing.” I’m not sure what he’s talking about. I never watched my episodes of Pop-Up Kitchen once it aired. It was too much for my anxious heart to relive the high stress, the intrusive questions during the one-on-one interviews, and I can barely remember it anyway, the actual cooking. It was like once the cameras were rolling my brain turned off and all I could do was cook.

“There’s a project I’ve got in the works. I think you’d be perfect for it,” he says.

I shake my head, trying to inject my words with as much sincerity as possible. “I’m only doing this for the restaurant. Not for some foot in the door for a television career.”

“We’ll put a pin in it,” he says.

“I’m serious, Paul. I’m no good for TV. I’m focusing on improving the kitchen.”

He shakes his head, smiling ruefully. “I don’t know where you’ve gotten it in your head that you were terrible on TV.”

Oh, I don’t know. Maybe it was the terrible things people said about me on Pop-Up Kitchen fan message boards and in my DMs. Or maybe it was the sick feeling I’d get in my stomach right before the director called action, or how the stress caused me to disassociate to the point that I couldn’t remember what I’d done or said.