When I sent an email to the address listed for her agent, I chalked it up to a mild crush, a strong Negroni, and the frenetic energy that comes with being wide-awake at two in the morning. When Sophie herself responded, excited, thankful, for the opportunity to run her own kitchen at my zero stars restaurant, I thought I could set aside the attraction and focus on putting Amy & May’s on the Boston scene. It was a relief to finally have someone to do this with, to share the absolute panic that comes with fulfilling your dream before you turn thirty, and watching it light up around you. To have someone to help put out the fire.

But if anything, my attraction has grown, despite that everything Chad said is technically true.

She does spend a lot of time in the walk-in. She’s always bent over her phone, worrying at her plump pink lower lip, frowning at the screen. The change was like whiplash. One minute our restaurant was thriving. Reservations months in advance, the atmosphere electric every single night. There were plenty of rubberneckers. People wanting to eat food prepared by someone who was on TV once, like the tangential proximity somehow made the food taste better.

And maybe it did. Until it didn’t. Because suddenly it was like Sophie’s fame ran out. And everyone just...stopped coming.

The last few months, she’s been nothing like the badass woman she was on the show, quietly acquiescing to all my ideas, blindly nodding to everything I say. Even her suggestion to take credit cards at the time of reservation was more of a question. But still, I should have listened.

Now I’m back where I started, doing it all alone. Except this time with a side of an even bigger unrequited crush, on a straight girl, no less. Maybe my biggest mistake of all was thinking I should rely on anyone but myself.

The rest of dinner service goes off without a hitch. If only three tables but no more no-shows counts as not a hitch. “Where’s Sophie?” I ask, after the last table has settled.

Carly jumps, dropping a pan into the sink. “Sorry, ma’am.”

The restaurant is quiet. Only the closing staff still here.

“Please, no. Don’t...” I shake my head. “Don’t call me that.”

She bends over the pan in the sink, the shwish shwish sound of the scouring pad grating at my shot nerves. “She’s in the walk-in,” Carly says.

Of course she is. I sigh. When we were eight, my twin brother, Wes, and I snuck out of bed and watched Jurassic Park. I was so traumatized by the scene with the raptors in the kitchen that to this day, the chill I get when I close a walk-in freezer door behind me is as much from fear as it is from cold.

Sophie doesn’t turn around, writing the date on a sauce container, as the door slams shut behind me.

“Next time, can you at least warn me you’re going to fire someone?” I wrap my arms around my middle in a fruitless attempt at staying warm.