Chapter 73

It didn’t happen overnight. The shift was small at first. Subtle. Like someone had peeled away a layer of fog I didn’t even know I’d been walking through.

Chef Conrad didn’t yell the next morning. He didn’t sneer when I accidentally sliced my truffles too thin. He didn’t call my name like it was a slur on his tongue.

Instead, he nodded. Once.

Not a compliment. Not forgiveness. But acknowledgement.

And it was enough.

For weeks, I’d braced myself for the next blow, the next humiliation. But after Liam’s visit, after that moment outside the office when everything in me cracked open and I let it, something changed.

In Conrad. In me.

He didn’t become soft. That man didn’t have a soft setting. But the personal edge disappeared. The storm in his eyes when he looked at me dulled to gray.

And for the first time, I could breathe in his kitchen.

---

School moved fast.

Too fast.

One day I was practicing soufflés until my arms ached, the next I was submitting mock business proposals for my final p