NEVER FOR YOU

PROLOGUE

Eleven Years Ago

Eleven years before he would lose his restaurant, before he would climb into a stranger’s black car and let it carry him toward the rest of his life, Elias Mercer was twenty three years old and certain that everything he would ever be depended on a single plate of food.

The showcase was the only thing the academy did that mattered. Once a year a room full of people who could make or end a career came to watch the graduating cooks present one dish, their dish, the thing that was supposed to announce who they were. Scholarships were won there. Apprenticeships in the great kitchens of the world. Whole futures handed across a tasting spoon. For most of the students it was a celebration. For Elias, who had arrived at the academy on a hardship grant with two shirts and a borrowed knife and a debt that woke him at night, it was the only door he had ever found that led anywhere but back.

He had been building his dish for a year. Not on paper, in his hands, a hundred times, until he could have cooked it blind. It was quiet and exact and it was the truest thing he had ever made, and standing at his station that morning with the room filling up behind him, he allowed himself, for the first time in his careful life, to want something out loud.

“You’re going to win,” said the only voice in the room that could still rattle him.

Rafael Soto leaned against the next station with flour on his forearms and that grin, the one that made everything look easy because for him everything was. He had talent the way other people had height, without earning it, without seeming to notice it. The judges already loved him. He did not need this the way Elias needed it, and they both knew it, and it was the one unbridgeable thing between them.

“Don’t talk to me,” Elias said. “Not today.”

“I mean it. Your dish is better than mine.”

“I know it is.”

Rafa laughed, delighted, the way he always was by Elias’s rare flashes of arrogance, and said something else, but Elias had already turned back to his station, because the first cooks were being called and his whole body had narrowed to a single point, and he did not have room left over for Rafael Soto.

He would think about that later. How he had turned his back. How the last easy thing between them had been a compliment he was too proud to answer.

It happened in the forty minutes before service.

He had left his station to collect his fish from the cold room, the way they all did, the way it was done, and when he came back something was wrong with the air of the place, a small disturbance, students glancing sideways. His sauce, the spine of the entire dish, the thing he had reduced for three hours, sat where he had left it. But it was wrong. He knew it before he tasted it, knew it from the colour, and when he did taste it the salt hit him like a hand across the face, ruined, scorched, four times seasoned by someone who knew exactly how little it would take to destroy a year of work.

There was no time to remake it. There was barely time to breathe.

And when he spun around, looking for something, anything, an answer, a reason, the first thing he saw was Rafael Soto standing at his station. Right at it. One hand on the rim of Elias’s pan. The other hand pulling back fast, too fast, the way you pull back from a thing you have been caught at, and his face, his open readable golden face, wearing an expression Elias had never seen on it before and had no name for in that moment and would spend eleven years deciding to call guilt.

“Elias.” Rafa’s voice was strange, urgent. “Elias, listen to me, it wasn’t —”

“Get away from my station.”

“Will you just —”

“Get away from it.”

His name was being called. The judges were waiting. And Elias Mercer walked to the front of the room with a dish whose heart had been torn out, and he served it because there was nothing else to serve, and he watched the faces of the people who held his future taste it and go politely, fatally blank.

He did not win. He did not place. The scholarship went to a girl who cried with joy, and the apprenticeship went, of course, to Rafael Soto, who did not look happy about it, who tried to cross the crowded room afterward with one hand wrapped in a white cloth, calling Elias’s name over the heads of strangers. Elias did not stop. He had already decided what the night meant. He had needed it too badly to survive any other version of the story, and so he chose the one that let him keep walking, the one with a villain in it, and the villain had flour on his forearms and a grin Elias would not see again for eleven years.

He left the academy that night and built his life with his own two hands and never once, in all the years that followed, let himself ask the only question that mattered, which was why a man who had just won everything would cross a room with a burned hand to reach the person he had supposedly beaten.

He would not ask it for a long time.

But the morning would come, in a kitchen called Meridian, with two cups of coffee cooling on a steel pass, when he finally would.