I shot Ryan a look. I wasn’t in the mood to stroke his ego—to pretend he’d won the latest battle of work husband versus real husband.
And I didn’t want to upset Danny, especially when birthdays were a big deal around here. We’d been together since we were twenty-one, college sweethearts. And every year, we tried to top the year before for each other. Danny was already irritated that I’d peeked at his email and seen the details, asked him to make a few changes to all that planning (to the guest list and the menu and the time—I did keep the venue).
“Look, you can pretend you had no idea,” Ryan said.
That was the last thing I wanted to do. While I had become somewhat of a seasoned liar over the years—a job requirement—I used to be a very honest person. And that was the person Danny knew—the one he had fallen in love with. Whenever I tried to stretch the truth with him, he would often see through it. And I didn’t want to fight.
“Handle it however you want,” Ryan said. “But we have to do this, okay?”
“Fine, whatever, just keep it under control.”
“When don’t I?” He paused, considering. “This morning notwithstanding.”
“Ryan, we have to deal with him.”
“Danny?” he said, confused.
“The hacker.”
He rolled his eyes. “I’m dealing with him! Five people at the studio are devoting all their time to figuring out which weirdo living with his mother in Idaho who jerked off to your videos one too many times did this thing.”
“Gross.”
Ryan sucked down the juice. “I aim to please.”
“Uh . . . guys?” Violet waltzed into the kitchen. “Amber is weighing in . . .”
Amber was Amber Rucci, aka Toast of the Town. A fellow culinary YouTube star. All of her dishes used toast as their base. Thick, old-fashioned brioche; salted, grainy rye. Some of her recipes were as simple as homemade almond butter on burnt brioche. Did that even count as a recipe? It counted enough that she was beloved. She was also young and attractive—and the host of the second-most popular YouTube cooking show, tracking only behind A Little Sunshine. Years ago, she had reached out and sent me an array of kitchen utensils (Let’s get cooking!!) to cement something like a friendship between us. I was more than happy to play nice too and sent her back a knife set (Your stove or mine?). Our “friendship” led to joint appearances on each other’s shows and a New York Times “Night Out” piece. On the menu was my tomato pie, accompanied by her avocado and mint toast.
Now, apparently, she wanted the world to know she wasn’t a fair-weather friend.
Believe in the power of Sunshine! #chefsunite #loveandpepper She linked to a photograph of us on Instagram, preparing dinner in her kitchen.
Violet put her phone away. “That’s nice, right?” she said. “Why didn’t she email personally, though?”
“What good would that do?” Ryan said. “No one would have seen it!”
“I hate toast,” I said.
Ryan smiled. “There’s my girl!” he said.
“Violet, I need you to get a few tweets out in the next fifteen minutes,” I said. “Something like . . .‘Hello, guys, this is Sunshine (the real Sunshine), what a morning!’ You understand.”
She headed toward the living room. “Already on it.”
Ryan called out after her. “Use one of those inspirational quotes on Instagram about how scary it is to have someone else speaking for you, pretending to be you. How strong you feel using your own voice again. Something.”
Violet turned around. “Ooh! I have a great one from Maya Angelou!” she said.
“Did I ask you for the details?” Ryan said, waving her off. “Use a yellow background!”
Then Ryan turned to me.
“Yellow makes people think of truth,” he said.
Had I read that somewhere? Or was Ryan just so convincing when he spewed his bullshit that I not only believed it, I believed I had always believed it?
I reached for my coffee. “Good to know.”
“I could do without the sarcasm.”
“So fix it, Ryan,” I said. “What if someone starts digging around? The Food Network will pull the plug. Everyone will pull the plug!”
“Not going to happen,” Ryan said.
I looked at him, uncertain.
“We have Meredith saying it’s not true. What kind of digging makes sense after that? Besides, no one wants to open that can of worms. There are two people who have released cookbooks in the last decade who had anything to do with the actual recipes in those books. At the most, you have a celebrity who created the dishes. The recipes are worked out in a test kitchen by some ghostwriter who actually knows what he’s doing.”
“A ghostwriter who received credit,” I said.
“So you want to tell the world now that Meredith is the ghostwriter? It’s a little late to give her credit.”
I thought of what I wasn’t saying out loud—the stuff that would surely sink our little empire if it got out. “We know it’s not just the recipes,” I said.
“Sunny . . .”
Ryan’s eyes softened, and for a second, it stopped feeling like he was producing me. It felt like he was being my friend.
“We also are the only ones who know. Trust me. We are safe,” he said.
He nodded with absolute conviction.
I felt myself sinking into his assured tone. And it was enough for me to push it aside.
“We good here?” he said.
“We are,” I said, almost meaning it.
It’s amazing, after all, what you’ll ignore when you want something to be right, isn’t it? Like in this case, the truth.
3
If I haven’t made it abundantly clear yet, Ryan had always had something of a loose hold on the truth. One of the first things he told me, in fact, was that he hated the words lies and truth. He said they were needlessly categorical. He liked to say instead: the story.
And the story, as far as the world knew, was a familiar one. It was a story that a lot of women could relate to. I was a small-town girl who, after college, decided to move to New York City. I was young, newly engaged, and struggling to make a name for myself as a journalist. I was working terrible hours at a sports magazine. (We settled on a sports magazine because Ryan thought a woman’s magazine was too clichéd.) The point was, I had moved far from where I’d come from—but instead of feeling great about this, I felt a strange pull toward my roots. So, the Sunday I turned twenty-six, I headed to the farmer’s market in Park Slope and made a family favorite—tomato pie—walking Danny through the various ingredients with stories of growing them on the farm. At some point, Danny picked up the video camera and filmed me putting the pie in the oven—later revealing the decadent finished treat.