I’d grown up in rural North Carolina, a little town called Hamilton. My parents and two younger sisters, Claire and Cameron, still resided there, living the small-town life and surviving on local gossip and small mindedness. I’d fled the town at the first opportunity.
I was the total cliché. The bad girl that never fit in. The rebel without a cause. The goth/hipster/emo chic that struggled to find her place in a society that didn’t even acknowledge her.
I was desperate to be anything but the high school cheerleader that married her quarterback boyfriend and never left town. I couldn’t stomach the idea of not doing anything with my life. I didn’t live expecting to get pregnant, hoping to breed future cheerleaders and quarterbacks, surviving on all the happenings around town— who was sleeping with who, and what little punk was selling drugs, and oh my God, did you know that so-and-so filed for bankruptcy?
I could not do it. I couldn’t even pretend to approve of that pathway for anyone else.
My rebellion made me a huge disappointment to my parents, who wanted nothing more than a prom queen daughter and future prom royalty grandchildren.
In protest, I’d spent middle school smoking under the bleachers and high school ditching class and avoiding team sports. And I’d almost made it out unscathed.
It was junior year and I was at my wit’s end with my parents and my shining star sisters that were happy to drink the Hamilton Kool-Aid. I met someone who got me in a way that nobody ever had. He listened to me and thought it was cool I liked to read instead of cheer. He liked the boho way I dressed and that I dyed my hair every color of the rainbow. He even liked that I wanted to leave Hamilton, that I saw my life bigger and better, and more purposeful than what that town had to offer. Because he wanted to leave too. Or, at least that’s what he’d told me when we talked about the future.
That’s how I ended up dating the star quarterback. Nolan and I had been friends since childhood, but in junior high, he’d gone his way and I had gone mine. Until eleventh grade, when Fate had partnered us for pig dissection. What had started as a familiar friendship quickly turned into something so serious I was still recovering from it.
And the worst part? Worse than falling in love with someone who lied to me, led me on, promised to marry me and did all that he could to trap me in that stupid town? I ended up accepting everything I didn’t want or like—high school politics with popular best friends and small-town dreams.
I was willing to give up everything for him. My parents saw Nolan’s power over me and jumped on the opportunity to trap me.
They bribed me with a sweet car to encourage me to go to school consistently. Homework was easy for me, so the good grades followed. They turned a blind eye to the partying because that’s what all the kids in town did. My parents carefully encouraged when Nolan started talking about the future and what life could be like for us once we’d graduated. They dropped helpful suggestions about where we could live and how quickly we could marry.
Nolan wasn’t the life I wanted, but I was in too deep to remember that. I loved him more than I had ever loved anything. And with our parents’ support, I slowly forgot my dream of leaving Hamilton and making something of myself. I forgot about doing bigger and better things than playing house.
He loved me too after all. And he didn’t want to leave Hamilton anymore. He liked it there. Plus, if we were going to get married so young, we should stick by our parents’ because they could help us if we ever needed it. And what about kids? Didn’t I want to raise them in a town I trusted and make sure they had the same idyllic childhood I did?
His argument tasted sweet and safe and it was embarrassing how easily I gave in.
Of course, I would stay. Of course, I would marry him. Of course, my plans could evolve now that I had him.
Everything changed the spring of my senior year. I had signed up for a semester of fluff, so I could skate through to graduation. One of the classes was a cooking class. My teacher, Mrs. Wilton, wasn’t the most inspiring mentor ever, but she didn’t need to be. All she needed to do was give me sharp knives and the opportunity to find myself in food.
And I did find myself. In the best way.
I ignored all my local college acceptance letters where Nolan had also been accepted and secretly applied to culinary schools. When I get the letter from the culinary arts program at The Art Institute at Raleigh-Durham, I cried tears of real joy for the first time in my life.
Not only was it one of the best programs in North Carolina, it took me far away from Hamilton and the life I’d been willing to settle for.
I kept the news a secret until after graduation, but even when I told Nolan and my family the change of plans, I made it seem like the AI was only a detour from the original plan. Not a total deviation in the trajectory of my future.
At the time, it was what I believed too. I hadn’t planned to leave Nolan. I hadn’t planned to abandon the plans we made for our future. And yet when it came down to it, I couldn’t make myself go through with community college. I couldn’t stomach the idea of living there a second longer, even if we were saving up for a place of our own.
Culinary school had been less of a carefully crafted alternative and more of a panicked, wild-eyed desperate last-ditch effort to save my soul. It sounded dramatic now, but that town had crushed my spirit. I couldn’t breathe there. I couldn’t be me. And I knew that if I stayed, I would never be happy either.
My parents were pissed of course. They couldn’t understand what I would do with a culinary degree in Hamilton. To this day, they were still waiting for me to regain my senses and come home. Every time I called them, they tried to lure me in with local drama and reminders that Nolan still hadn’t found anyone to settle down with.
I gently reminded them that I had landed my dream job and I was still able to pay rent on time, but I’d call them the following Sunday and we could do the song and dance all over again. We hadn’t ended a conversation pleasantly in years.
Mostly, it was my mother. She blamed me for ruining her life, for letting go of Nolan, for screwing everything up like I was so prone to do. My dad was disappointed he couldn’t see me whenever he wanted, but he didn’t try to emotionally blackmail me to move home.
And then there was Nolan.
For as young as we were, our love was real. We stayed together for way longer than we should have. Seven years of my life had been spent holding onto something neither of us was brave enough to let go of. We fought all the time. He kept promising to follow me to Durham. And I kept believing him. It was only a matter of time before we self-destructed.
At first, he would visit me on weekends and we would look for apartments we both liked and Google jobs he would enjoy. As the years piled up, he stopped visiting as much and I stopped expecting anything from him. Eventually all the reasons we should be together stopped making sense. We wanted different things out of life. We’d grown into new people that didn’t have anything in common. We said we still loved each other, but if it was love it was selfish and entitled. Neither of us had been willing to compromise. Neither of us had really wanted to change—no matter how many empty promises we made.
Seven years. Seven years with a man that couldn’t follow through on anything. From when I was seventeen until I finally let go three years ago at twenty-four, he always had an excuse for why he couldn’t transfer schools or quit his job at the high school or move in with me. Seven years of phone calls full of awkward silences and disappointed weekends when he would cancel our plans. Seven years of making the arduous back and forth, trying to make a long-distance relationship work between two people totally unwilling to try.
He even proposed. Right after he’d graduated with his teaching degree and accepted his position at Hamilton High School, he showed up on my doorstep with a black square box and a tiny diamond. “I love you, Kaya.” He promised. “I want to do right by you.”
My poor, frustrated, neglected heart had soared. We were finally going to have the life we??
?d been dreaming about for so long. I was finally going to be able to give up Hamilton for good and settle into my Durham life. I was finally going to get to be full-time with the man I loved.
Only his plans had changed. He’d rearranged our future but didn’t tell me until after I’d said yes to marrying him. He’d decided he no longer wanted to move to Durham by then. He’d bought a little house on the outskirts of town and loved his new job.
I knew I could never move back. No matter how quaint he promised our life would be. There wasn’t anything in that town for me. And yet still, I hadn’t been willing to give him up. Stupidly, I thought that if he loved me enough, I could change his mind. Eventually, he would realize I was worth the move.
As our engagement dragged on and on without a wedding date to plan for or any real motivation by either of us to get married, I too-slowly realized we were over. I finally acknowledged we had been over for a very long time.
It killed me. I had poured years into that man. I had truly believed I would spend the rest of my life with him. And I knew he felt the same way about me. Admitting that everything had been for nothing did something irreversible to my heart, added layers of paranoia and skepticism that scarred me. His lack of motivation to be with me felt like rejection in the worst way. Why wasn’t I enough for him? Why didn’t he want to be with me more than he wanted to be comfortable in that godforsaken town?
By the end of our relationship, I felt brittle, hollowed out, and empty. I knew it wasn’t entirely Nolan’s fault. I hadn’t been willing to change. I hadn’t been open to moving. But that didn’t stop the insecurity from slipping inside like an evil ninja and setting up residence in my heart. I wasn’t the kind of girl men moved for. I wasn’t the woman that men wanted to spend their life with. I was safe and comfortable and throw away.
I broke up with him over Christmas when I was home and staying with my parents. It hadn’t been messy. He said he’d known it was coming for a while, but he didn’t want to be the one to hurt my feelings.
That New Year’s Eve, he went to a party with all our old high school friends and hooked up with Delaney Cooper, former head cheerleader and prom queen. I’d found out about it via social media and the walls around my heart had grown barbed wire and electric fence.
Of all people, her? Of all parties, that one?
I had still hoped he’d come after me, move to Durham, prove I was worth the fight. For years after, I clung to the hope that he would wake up from all of the hooking up and dating random girls and realize I was better… what we had was better than the meaningless, shallow life he lived now. But he never did. Or I wasn’t worth it after all. Face to face with his true colors, I had to acknowledge that he probably never loved me. He merely loved the idea of me.
He’d broken my heart. And maybe I had broken his. Maybe him. He still texted every once in a while, when he’d been drinking too much and the girl he went home with didn’t do enough to help him forget how much he hated his life. But that wasn’t my fault.
I’d spent three years having this argument with myself and it always boiled down to that toxic town. He could leave. He had a degree in high school education and experience coaching the football team. Nothing was holding him there. He had family, but it wasn’t like he had to move to the moon.
Some nights, I would text him too. When I had been drinking too much. And when guilt and heartache and nostalgia for what we’d had all those years ago threatened to eat me alive. I would reach out to him and ask him to come visit me.
And he would counter that I should come home to him.
There were also the times I went home to visit my parents for holidays or birthdays or whatever…
The problem was that Nolan was as lethal as the town. He would lure me with his all-American smile and quarterback muscles and I would get lost in the bliss of being eighteen and invincible all over again.
The last time we’d hooked up had been eighteen months ago. I’d been in town for my parents thirtieth wedding anniversary and had had too many white wine spritzers at their country club garden party.
My parents had the love story Nolan and I had tried to have. High school sweethearts, married at twenty-one, kids at twenty-four, retirement on the horizon. And despite my hang-ups with them, they truly loved each other.
Calling Nolan that night had felt inevitable. I’d been drunk and lonely and he had been happy to pick me up. That night he’d been as familiar and lackluster as I remembered him to be. I woke up the next morning surrounded by Hamilton High football t-shirts and empty PBR cans and felt sick to my stomach.
No matter how much I’d tried to convince myself differently over the years, Nolan was the same as he’d been when I’d fallen in love with him. That small-town, rudderless life was enough for him. He didn’t want anything more than that. By the time I’d put Hamilton in my rearview mirror, I had decided to be happy for him. And why not? He wasn’t going to change.
And neither was I. The small town wasn’t for me. Not even if it meant the house and the husband and the two-point-five kids. Cooking was worth the sacrifice, worth the loss of everything else. It was worth the chaos and the long hours and the exhaustion. Even the critic reviews and the never-ending, suffocating pressure to get better and do better and become the fucking best.
And if I got Sarita… I couldn’t even think that far ahead. I had to figure out if there was someone in-house that Ezra would handpick.
My heart dropped to my toes at the very thought of it. Grabbing my phone, I quickly typed out a text to Dillon.
Want to meet for coffee before work?
The text dots started dancing immediately. I’m headed to Vera and Killian’s restaurant. I have to drop something off for E. Want to meet me there?
My plan was to grill Dillon for every last detail she’d learned from Ezra about Sarita, but Killian and Vera would be even better. Yes! Going now?
I’ll be there in ten.
See you soon.
I hauled ass to the shower and skipped shaving. I mean, I was wearing pants all day, there was no point. Scrunching my hair with enough product to encourage global warming to keep up the good work, I let my chin-length, bright pink hair air dry while I threw on minimal makeup. I was ready in record time.
There wasn’t a whole lot to my uniform other than a clean pair of pants, the right shoes and a tight cami under my chef’s coat, which I didn’t wear until I got in the kitchen. I grabbed a gray silk duster for the cool morning air and my messenger bag and headed out the door with a banana in my hand. It wasn’t necessarily the breakfast of champions, but it would do for today.
I’d grab coffee later. Ugh, the thought of not having a cup before I left nearly killed me. Coffee was essential to life. I wasn’t even very smart without it. Without my morning cup, I turned into this un-caffeinated, bumbling idiot that couldn’t remember words or social cues or anything beyond zombie-level hunger.
Undoubtedly, this was the perfect time to feel out my dream job with three other stellar chefs who probably didn’t even need coffee to have coherent conversations before noon.
I rolled my eyes at myself and hurried down the stairs of my apartment building. The sun was warm as I stepped out to the small parking lot attached to my midtown building. For a single person living in Durham, I made a decent enough living. But I was all middle of the road. Medium salary. Medium part of town. Medium apartment. Yes, I was on the nicer end of the spectrum, but it wasn’t enough.
What scared me the most about my ambitions was that I would never have enough, be enough, do enough. That I would always want more.
Those starving pieces buried inside terrified me. Would I ever be totally happy with what I was doing or where I was in life? Would I ever feel joyful contentment? Or even moderately good enough?
There was a certain level of striving that I was okay with. I didn’t want to lose my drive or my standards of excellence. Those qualities required fierce tenacity and ferocious hunger. My long-term goals required me
to push, to keep rising and become a better chef.
Yes. Those were good traits, but what about the darker side of those same desires—the gaping abyss inside me that wanted to consume everything in my path. Would that desire ever be filled? Satisfied? Exhausted?
I shivered despite the warm day. Did I even want to consider those questions without a cup of coffee first?
I yanked open the rusty door to my Land Cruiser and decided my crazy musings could wait until after caffeine. My foggy brain didn’t have the energy for serious self-examination right now.
Thursday morning traffic was as difficult as every other day of the work week. Durham wasn’t an overly populated city by any means but driving downtown was always a special experience. Traffic made me rage-y.
By the time I got to Killian and Vera’s restaurant, Salt, I had devolved into a furious, cursing caveman. I noticed Dillon’s Lexus in the parking lot and breathed a minute sigh of relief. It was comforting to have an ally in life in the nearby vicinity. Knowing I was meeting up with Dillon soothed some of my frazzled edges and whispered rational thought back into my haggard brain.
Although, after wrestling my purse from the passenger’s seat and walking the short distance to the main entrance, my traffic frustration and subsequent calm had turned to buzzing nerves and a flurry of internal butterflies.
I didn’t know Vera enough to call her a friend, but she had always been nice to me. If we ran into each other in a public space, I wouldn’t hesitate to walk over and say hello. Killian, on the other hand, was intimidating as hell. Like some kind of brutal warrior from Greek mythology that was willing to kill you over a stolen wineskin. My courage shriveled to an embarrassing shell of itself.
He was mortal, I reminded myself. Exactly like me. Fine, four years of my life had been spent working for him, listening to him yell at me, perfecting my craft so he wouldn’t yell at me, trying to do whatever it took to avoid him yelling at me… But he was as human as me.