Second Helping

Chapter 2: Studio Rules

The studio door was unlocked. It usually was. He came and went with whoever he was shooting with that week, and the lock had never been about security, just about the landlord.

Grace pushed it open with one shoulder, bag already open.

Ethan stood just inside, phone in hand, and looked up the way a man looks up at a courier.

"You're here."

"You said to come."

"Right." He stepped aside, but not far. "Your stuff's mostly over there. Wren brought her own jars, so yours can go."

Inside, the sound of a phone being repositioned on a tripod. The light stand ticked against the floor.

Wren was at the counter in the ivory apron. Cotton-linen, the one she'd bought herself after eight months of saving for it, because the woman who made them had retired and there were no more. The ties were in a bow behind her back now, low, like she'd done it quickly. The shot rig was arranged on the counter exactly as Grace had left it.

Grace set her bag on the floor.

"What are you filming?"

Wren turned, and her whole face rearranged itself into welcome. "You're here! Come in, come in — we're just doing a studio tour." She tilted the phone back toward the wall of spice jars. "People kept asking how we set things up."

"You're filming my studio."

"*Our* studio," Wren said, and turned the screen to show her. Comments were moving up the side.

**so clean. very pro setup.**

**wren is really arranging this herself?**

**totally different vibe from the old videos, in a good way**

Every jar on that shelf had been carried back in a suitcase from somewhere — smoked paprika from a shop in Austin with a hand-lettered sign, dried anchovies from a Korean market in Fort Lee that was only open four days a week, five kinds of chile flakes she couldn't have told you why she owned two of. Every label was in her own handwriting. She'd written them with a fine-tip pen because Ethan had said once that the thick marker looked cheap on camera.

Wren swept the phone across the shelf and never stopped talking. "I've been collecting these for a while. Ingredients are the soul of it, you know? You can't fake the pantry."

Ethan crossed the room without hurrying and stood at her shoulder like it had always been his spot.

"I'll pack my own things," Grace said, and moved around him.

His hand came down on the counter beside her bag. Not touching it. Just there.

"Don't take studio stuff."

"Which of it is studio stuff."

"Everything on the counter, basically. Except your knife." He shrugged. "The camera rig, the lights, the blender—"

"The blender is mine."

"It was bought with account money."

"It was bought with my cut of the account money."

"Your cut was for your work." He said it like he was explaining a receipt. "Your work was in service of the account. Don't make it personal."

"I'm not making it personal. I'm packing."

"Look." He glanced at Wren, then back. "You built the recipes. Great. But anyone could've built them. You film a hundred restaurants, you eventually get the formula right. It's not some special gift."

She kept her eyes on the bag.

Two hundred videos. Every one of them had started as a doc on her laptop at one in the morning — sourcing, shot list, question order — and ended as a cut she'd exported at four, after the color pass, after the subtitle sweep, after the music dropped out exactly where she'd wanted it to.

"Anyone could do it," she said.

"Anyone with the setup, yeah." He picked up a light stand and moved it out of her way, which she hadn't asked him to do. "That's the point. The setup is the account. The account is mine."

Wren had muted the phone. She came around the counter and stood close, closer than there was any reason to, and dropped her voice, the way you do when you're about to do somebody a favor.

"Grace. I really don't want to make this hard for you." Her hand hovered near the apron ties, didn't touch them. "If you don't want me wearing this, I can take it off—"

"Wear it," Grace said. She crouched and reached into the bottom cabinet, past the tart pans, for the tartlet molds.

"You're being so decent about this." Wren crouched too, so they were eye level. "Can I tell you something? He was talking last night. He said you're a good person, you're just — how did he put it—" She frowned delicately, as if hunting for a word she already had. "He said being with you was like living in a room with no windows. Like, no air. That's what he said. I don't think he meant it meanly."

Grace set the molds into her bag.

"But I think you're great," Wren said. "Quiet people have their own thing going."

Across the room Ethan looked up from his phone. "Wren. Come pick the plates for the hot pot shoot."

Wren stood and went to him, quick, and leaned in over his shoulder to look at the screen. "Can we use Grace's ceramic bowls? They look so good on camera—"

"Those are studio too," Ethan said, and looked at Grace.

She zipped the bag. The knife was already inside it, wrapped in the cloth.

Wren came back. She had a way of arriving from the side. "Oh — one thing. Ethan signed a brand deal with the people at Goldbrook? The hot pot place? Five hundred thousand." She let it sit, watching Grace's face. "He said you were the one who originally reached out to them. He wants me to take over the contact. They're asking for an original formula proposal—"

"The document hasn't gone out yet."

"I know, I know. Could you send it today, though? They're pushing."

Grace had made the calls to get Goldbrook to pick up. She'd written the pitch four times. Ethan had told her it was too small a fry to spend a week on, right up until the moment it wasn't.

She lifted the bag onto her shoulder and walked to the door.

"I'm taking the knife."

"Where's the formula." He hadn't looked up.

"I'll think about it."

"What's to think about?" That brought his head up, forehead folded. "Are you holding this over me?"

Wren leaned in, pitched low. "Ethan, don't — she wouldn't do that."

Grace opened the door. She looked back once. Wren had one hand resting on the knot of the apron and one on the edge of the worktable, and behind her, on the wall, every jar with Grace's handwriting on it.

"Grace." His voice had the flat upward tilt he used on freelancers. "Send it by Thursday. Or I'll have to call this what it is — you tanking a deal over personal feelings."

She shut the door behind her.