She stood up. “Hello?” she said into the phone. She paused. “Who are you?”
She started pacing the length of the loft—the open kitchen to the living room—floor-to-ceiling steel windows lining her way. Danny had designed the apartment around those steel windows, their clean lines framing the brick building across the street, an eighteenth-century tea distributor, the etched white LAPPIN TEA on the front still announcing itself.
“No! I need Craig . . .” she said, screaming at the person on the phone.
I turned back to my computer, read the most recent replies to the Meredith Landy tweet.
@sunshinecooks Is this true? #Whatthefuck
@sunshinecooks Thought u were too skinny. #realchefseat @sunshinecooks Dear Sunshine, you’re a monster.
The monster bit felt like a serious overreaction, and for the first time, I was glad to be locked out of my system so I didn’t say something to @kittymom99 that I later regretted. I closed the Twitter window and went back to crafting responses for the rest of my social media avatars. I had a staffer who ran each of these. But I was not about to trust a twenty-five-year-old Holyoke grad to deliver a message to my 1.5 million Facebook friends.
“They’re shutting it down!” Violet yelled out. “Craig is shutting it down!”
I looked up to see Violet doing the moonwalk over the Persian rug, dancing her way past the windows—as Ryan walked in the front door, arriving, as he always did, just in time to take credit.
“They’re shutting it down,” he said, like Violet hadn’t just reported as much.
Ryan Landy. Columbia Law and Business School, newly forty, and chiseled everywhere: jaw, chin, shoulders. He was in his uniform of jeans and a sports coat, his shirt one-button-too-open. Since turning forty, he had adopted the forced-casual addition of hipster sneakers, which added to his perfect mix of little-boy good-looking, sleazy, and something (charming, deceitful) that made pretty much every woman he’d encountered putty in his hands—including his wife, Meredith, who seemed unable to do anything except forgive him for those other women.
Violet, still on the phone, put her hand over the receiver. “I’ve got Craig,” she said. “Should be down in thirty seconds.”
“Should’ve been down THIRTY SECONDS AGO, Craig,” Ryan said, loud enough for Craig to hear.
Violet plugged her ears. “What was that, Craig?” she said, scurrying away.
Ryan headed toward my egg chair, twirled me around, and offered his half-smile. Charming.
“Are you hungry?” he said.
“Am I hungry? Ah . . . no.”
He headed toward the kitchen. “Well, you better have something to eat in this place . . . ’Cause I’m starving,” he said.
Ryan reached into my refrigerator and pulled out a green juice, a hard-boiled egg. Then he jumped up onto the countertop, taking a seat. My gorgeous gray slate countertop: stunning beside the glass refrigerator, the eight-burner stove, and stainless steel ovens.
It was a chef’s kitchen in every way, even if I was a true chef in none.
He popped the entire egg into his mouth. “Don’t look so nervous,” he said.
“I’m not nervous, Ryan. I’m pissed. How did this happen?”
“Kevin let it happen. But Jack spent the morning securing your other accounts with a firewall,” he said, his mouth full. “New passwords, new security codes. Nobody outside this room will have them. Nobody outside Jack, that is.”
“Who is Jack?”
“The new Kevin.”
I frowned. “It’s out there now, though. People are going to think—”
“People are going to think exactly what we tell them to think,” he said. “I mean, listen to Meredith’s statement,” he said as he pulled out his phone and started reading. “My husband, the esteemed producer Ryan Landy, has worked with Sunshine Mackenzie since he discovered her first video on YouTube, making this very recipe. With the exception of being a fan (and I like to think a valued early taster), I have no claim to any of Sunshine’s scrumptious creations.”
“Why is everyone talking to me like I wasn’t the one who wrote that?” I said.
He smiled. “I’m just praising your good work.”
I nodded, but there was no relief sinking in. It had all gotten a little close. And neither of us was saying the truth out loud. Meredith was the real chef. They were her recipes. Her vision. Or, rather, Ryan’s vision, and her execution.
“You don’t think Meredith is behind this, do you?”
Ryan laughed, the thought of his wife betraying him apparently hilarious. “No fucking way!”
“What if she—”
“She didn’t. It would destroy us financially. She would never do that.”
“So, who?” I said.
Ryan shook his head. “A hacker, someone who got into your email . . .”
His nonchalance was really starting to irritate me. “How would a random get so close to the truth?”
He shrugged. “I told you, the bigger you get, the more people come after you. And someone is apparently after you. Probably with the Food Network deal, they’re excited . . .”
The Food Network deal. I hadn’t wanted to mention it. I was slated to be a cohost of a new farm-to-table cooking show. Competition shows were now the Holy Grail on the network. No one was offered a straight cooking show unless they were a movie star turned culinary star. But that’s how popular A Little Sunshine had become. The show was premiering in September—at least it was supposed to. Unless this hacker ruined everything.
Ryan jumped down off the countertop. “The point is I cut off his access. There’s nothing he can do now.”
He. Ryan said he. “You think it’s a he? That’s interesting. That’s my gut too.”
He walked up to me, so we were face-to-face, his palm gently cupping my neck. “Can we be done with this already? I have other things to discuss, okay?”
I looked away, not wanting to engage with any of his other things. “Like what?”
“Tonight. The party.”
I closed my eyes. In the chaos, I had forgotten. Danny had planned a surprise party in the back room of Locanda Verde for fifty of our closest friends.
“We should cancel it,” I said.
“Cancel it? No!”
I already knew where he was going. He was going to use my party to fix this.
“You’re going to spin the story.”
“I’ve trained you well, young Sunshine.”
I drilled him with a dirty look. But he wasn’t wrong. He had.
“I’m inviting the press. People, Us Weekly. Great opportunity to put these rumors to bed.”
Ordinarily, I would have rolled with it. But I hesitated. The hack, the day, the song—some of it, all of it, had gotten to me. And I was feeling . . . something.
“Danny doesn’t want publicity tonight. He specifically said.”
“And I care about what Danny wants, why?”