Second Helping

Chapter 3: Access Revoked

The email came at two in the morning.

Grace was on the floor of the new apartment. It still smelled like packing tape and fresh paint, and most of her life sat around her in boxes, squared off and labeled in her own handwriting. She was awake because her body hadn't learned the noises of the place yet — the refrigerator ticking, a bus sighing at the corner, a dog complaining through two walls.

She had opened her laptop to check nothing. To make sure nothing had happened.

The subject line was boilerplate. Account notification.

Dear user: administrative access to the account "Second Helping" has been removed by the primary account holder.

She read it twice.

Second Helping. She had come up with that name in a rented apartment with bad windows, writing it in the condensation on the glass with one finger so she could see how it looked before she said it out loud. Ethan had glanced over and said it was fine. He had taken the photo that became the avatar — himself mid-laugh with a tasting spoon in his hand. He had typed his own phone number into the registration field, because she was in the other room doing the color pass and had said, just put yours in, I don't care.

Three years ago she hadn't cared.

She sat still with the laptop open on her knees. The screen was the brightest thing in the room. She didn't cry. She noticed that she didn't, the way you notice a light left on in a room you've walked out of.

At some point she closed the laptop and set it beside a box marked KITCHEN, and the sky went grey, and she didn't sleep.

---

At seven, Wren posted.

The photo was the worktable — she knew its grain, the burn mark near the back edge from a pan she'd run too hot. Behind it, the spice wall. Every jar hers, every label in her handwriting. In the foreground, laid open at a deliberate angle, was the notebook.

Kraft-paper cover, A5, a coffee ring in the lower right corner.

Two hundred and six recipes inside it. Ratios, temperatures, the order things went into the pan, all of it revised in red pen, sometimes three or four times, sometimes with a line struck through an entire page and start over scratched into the margin at two in the morning.

Wren's caption: *tidying up the workroom and finding so many little spark notes. turns out all our Second Helping formulas have been living in this treasure. every page is real heart. going to keep cooking every dish with love from here ❤️*

Our. She said our.

Grace read it once, then read the comments.

*wren is so thorough!!*

*okay but these two together?? the content is going to take off*

*the old videos were good but they were missing something. it feels warmer now. wren brings a whole different energy*

Warmer.

Every frame of those videos had been graded by Grace at one and two and three in the morning with the door shut, matching the skin tones of Ethan's hands over a pan coming up to heat against a reference she'd built herself over eighteen months, so the account would look like one continuous kitchen instead of two hundred separate shoots. Every voiceover was hers, recorded into a pillow fort of blankets on the far side of the room so the fan wouldn't bleed into the mic.

Somebody looked at all of it and called it warmer, because Wren was standing in front of it.

Grace took a screenshot of the post — table, notebook, caption, first six comments — and filed it in a new folder on her desktop. She named the folder with today's date.

She didn't name it anything else yet.

Then she called Ethan.

He picked up on the second ring.

"Did the formula go out?"

"Did you remove my admin access."

A pause, less than a breath. "The platform only allows one admin."

"It allowed two before."

"Before was before." Behind him, something shifted — a chair, a voice she decided not to identify. "Don't make this a bigger thing than it is."

"Why is my notebook at Wren's?"

"What notebook."

"Kraft cover. Two hundred and six recipes. She posted it from the studio."

Two seconds of silence. She could hear him deciding which true thing to say.

"It was at the studio," he said. "Not a personal item."

"My name is written on it."

"Does writing your name declare ownership? Then every video I'm on camera for is mine."

There it was. He'd never answered what she said. He'd climbed one level up and used the bigger thing to crush the smaller one under it, the way he did every time, until the smaller one started to feel like an opinion.

"Ethan. Every recipe in that notebook, I developed. You know that."

"I don't deny you participated." He sounded tired, reasonable, generous with the word. "But it was produced under the account framework. The results belong to the account IP. You never signed an independent-creation agreement."

"No."

"Right. So."

"I never signed one because I never thought I'd need one with my own partner."

Another pause. Then, "What do you actually want. You want the account and me both? Is that it?"

"I already let both go."

"Then stop calling me about a notebook." His voice changed. Something softer, the one he used at the end of long nights when he wanted her to shoot till morning and needed her to say yes. "Listen. I know your part mattered. I'm not saying it didn't. But Second Helping is where it is because of my face, my energy, the relationships I've built. Your piece was important. It wasn't irreplaceable."

Important. Not irreplaceable.

A week ago he'd needed her password. A week ago he'd needed her formulas.

She sat with her back against a box and said nothing.

---

After she hung up she opened the laptop again and typed a web address into the search bar that she'd never had a reason to visit.

The government trademark database loaded slowly, then all at once.

**Second Helping.** Word mark. One class for prepared foods and seasonings, a second class for online cooking content.

Registrant: Ethan Hale.

Filing date: sixty-one days ago.

Sixty-one days ago they were still together. Sixty-one days ago was the cold stretch after the fight about the airport — Wren had called him at eleven at night to pick her up because her flight got rerouted, and Grace had said why does she call you, and Ethan had said you're being controlling, and then he'd suggested they cool off for a few days.

She'd spent those days rewriting the Goldbrook pitch.

She'd been on version four.

Grace stared at his name on the page. The font was the font the government used for everything. It made him look like a form. Like anybody. Like a line item.

He had gone and filed her words under his own name. He hadn't told her. That was the part that sat cold in her chest — not that he'd hidden it, but that he probably hadn't thought of it as hiding. He probably thought of it as paperwork.

Her phone buzzed.

**Ethan**: *The brand wants a video call. You don't need to be on it — Wren is handling it. Send the formula tonight.*

She looked at that for a while. *You don't need to be on it.*

She typed back: *Got it.*

Then she put the phone face down on the floor, in the middle of the unpacked boxes, and looked at the closed edge of the laptop, and did not open the formula document.

Outside, a delivery truck braked somewhere down the block, and then it was quiet again.