Recipe for a Broken Heart

Chapter 1

Chapter 1 — Closing Time

The bell above the door at Maggie's Diner jingled for the eleventh time that hour, and Camille Bennett didn't even look up. She already knew who it was — the same regulars, the same orders, the same tired Tuesday night rolling toward closing time like it had somewhere better to be.

"Table four wants the check," Denise called from behind the counter, not stopping her wipe-down of the coffee machine.

"On it."

Camille grabbed the little black folder, slid the receipt inside, and carried it over with a smile that had gotten so practiced it barely cost her anything anymore. That was the trick of this job. You learned to smile with your mouth and think with the rest of you. Right now the rest of her was doing math — rent, her mother's prescription refill, the little bit she still owed on her brother Marcus's textbooks, and whatever was left over, which lately wasn't much of anything.

"Thanks, sweetheart," the man at table four said, an older regular who tipped in loose change and called every waitress sweetheart like it was a job requirement of his own. She thanked him anyway. Two dollars was still two dollars.

By the time the last table cleared out, it was almost eleven, and Camille's feet had that dull ache that came from ten hours in shoes that had stopped being comfortable about a year ago. She untied her apron, hung it on the hook by the kitchen, and caught her reflection for half a second in the dark window glass. Twenty-eight years old. A business degree with honors sitting in a frame in her mother's hallway, gathering dust like it was decorative instead of earned.

She hadn't planned on this. None of it. Not the diner, not the apartment she shared with her mother and Marcus because none of them could afford to live alone, not the quiet ache that showed up sometimes in the middle of an ordinary afternoon and reminded her that two years ago she'd had a ring on her finger and a whole future picked out, color-coded, planned down to the venue.

She didn't let herself think about David very often. Most days she managed it fine. But some nights, closing up an empty diner with the chairs stacked on the tables around her, she thought about how easily he'd traded her in. Not for someone better. Just someone richer. A woman with a name people recognized and a bank account that made Camille's hard work look like a hobby by comparison. He hadn't even had the decency to be dramatic about it. He'd just stopped calling, and then there'd been a picture online, and then a wedding announcement in a magazine Camille used to read for fun and never opened again.

That was the part that still stung, if she was honest. Not that he'd left. People left. It was that it had been so easy for him. Like she'd never mattered enough to be worth staying for.

"You're doing the thing again," Denise said, snapping her out of it. Denise had worked at Maggie's for eleven years and had a gift for reading people that Camille suspected was wasted on diner work.

"What thing?"

"The staring-at-nothing thing. You do it every time that bell rings a certain way." Denise nodded toward the door, though it was closed and locked now, nobody there. "You okay?"

"I'm fine. Just tired." It wasn't a lie, exactly. Just not the whole truth.

Camille grabbed her coat and her bag, said goodnight, and stepped out into the cold. The walk home was fifteen minutes if she moved fast, which she did, because the wind coming off the water tonight had teeth. Her phone buzzed in her pocket halfway there. A text from her mother.

Marcus needs new shoes for the interview on Friday. Can we talk when you get home? Also don't worry, I already started dinner, lol.

Camille smiled despite herself. Her mother's texts always had that lol tacked onto the end like an apology for existing, for needing anything at all, even something as small as shoes for her son's job interview. It made something twist in Camille's chest. Her mother had worked two jobs for years after the divorce, had raised both of them on grit and secondhand furniture and sheer stubborn love, and she still apologized for asking her daughter for help.

That was the thing nobody told you about being the reliable one. You didn't resent it — Camille loved her family fiercely, would have walked through fire for either of them without blinking — but somewhere along the way, being needed had quietly replaced being wanted. She hadn't gone on a date in over a year. Hadn't wanted to. It was easier to keep her heart in a drawer somewhere, safely out of reach, and pour everything she had into rent and groceries and her little brother's shoe size.

When she got home, the apartment smelled like her mother's chicken stew, and Marcus was sprawled on the couch scrolling his phone with the particular restlessness of a twenty-two-year-old who wanted a real job so badly it had started to look like grief.

"There she is," her mother said, wiping her hands on a dish towel and pulling Camille into a hug before she'd even gotten her coat off. "Sit. Eat first. Then we'll talk money."

"Ma, I'm not that hungry—"

"Sit," her mother said again, in the tone that had never once in twenty-eight years lost an argument, and Camille sat.

Later, after the dishes, after she'd quietly transferred what she could to her mother's account and pretended not to notice her mother's eyes going wet with gratitude, Camille sat at the kitchen table with her laptop, the blue light the only thing keeping her awake. She wasn't looking for anything in particular. Just scrolling, the way you do at midnight when your body's too tired to sleep and your mind won't slow down.

That was when she saw it. A job posting, tucked between two ads for warehouse work and a listing for a barista position she'd already applied to twice. Administrative and Operations Coordinator — Rousseau Industries, new Canadian branch. Business degree preferred. Bilingual a plus.

She read it twice. Then a third time.

It wasn't glamorous. It probably wasn't even that well paid, not at first. But it was real. It was the kind of job her degree had been for, the kind of job that could mean, eventually, not counting every dollar before it left her hand. She thought about her mother's tired eyes and Marcus's restless scrolling and the framed diploma no one ever looked at anymore.

Camille didn't believe in fate. She'd stopped believing in things like that around the same time she stopped believing a ring on her finger meant anything permanent. But she believed in trying, because trying was the only thing that had ever actually gotten her anywhere.

She opened a new document and started her resume from scratch.

Somewhere across the ocean, a man was already boarding a plane, though she didn't know it yet — and neither of them had any idea how much was about to change.