Chapter 2

But the woman added, “Yes, but that’s not how it works. He doesn’t have a cafeteria card.”

“Well, feed him and I’ll get him a cafeteria card tomorrow. All right? No moral conundrum there.” I hung up.

Olivier had disappeared. Good. I went back to my brother on the other line. “Sorry, Boone.”

He chuckled. “Uh, everything okay there at Nico Headquarters?”

“Chef Nick?” Now Tom, Olivier’s sous-chef, stood in my door. “There are no clean uniforms downstairs.”

“Yeah? Wow.” I eyeballed him. “That is just—wow.”

“Never mind,” he muttered, somewhere in the hall.

“Hello?” my brother asked. “You still there, man?”

“Oh, sorry, Bunny. What?”

“Nothing. Have a good one, bro. I’ll pick up the gift. No worries.”

I put down my phone, and the second I did, the damn thing rang again.

And that, ladies and gents, was a typical afternoon for me.2: Nothing Says I Love You Like Red Velvet Cake

After the dust had settled at Split, I went upstairs to our home, to check up on Derek.

Inside our Old Port loft, I dropped the torture device people called a cell phoneon the table by the door and tossed my shoes off.It smelled like Irish Spring soap in the air, so Derek was probably just coming out of the shower. Eager to see his face, I went looking for him, walking across the huge open space that was our living room, dining room and kitchen, knowing I’d find Der in the back room, where the light was best. That was where he’d set up his atelier. Passing the kitchen, I spotted the peanut butter and jelly sandwich he’d made for himself but hadn’t eaten.

Not a good sign. Was he having a bad day?

I found him in his sunny workshop, standing at the huge window. He seemed to be staring at the shops that lined the narrow cobblestone street beneath him. It was strange how Derek couldn’t hear me sometimes—how deep his imaginary world was. Standing in the doorway, I watched him for a second, my stare lingering over his cherry red hair, so thick and dazzling in the winter light. He wore light blue jeans and a white smock stained with his favorite colors: Prussian Blue, Orange Vermilion, and Chrome Yellow. The way he stood with his head slightly bowed, his lovely mouth ready to smile—well, he was my very own renaissance painting, both mystic and musing.

But I needed to see his eyes. Then I’d know just how bad the headache was today.

He must have felt my gaze on him, because he looked over, and at the sight of me, his green eyes lit up. “Hey, you. How long have you been standing there watching me?”

I’d known this man for over twenty years, and yet, every time our eyes met, I discovered something new in his.

“Long enough to get high on the solvent fumes,” I joked. I walked over to the easel. “This is incredible, by the way. Wow.” I stared at his new painting, a luminous landscape of stormy skies. It blew my mind how talented of an artist Derek was turning out to be.

In the first year following his motorcycle accident, we’d both thought he’d recovered from his brain injury, but in the last months, Derek’s symptoms had returned in full force. Stress, the doctor said. A migraine had kept him in bed for three days, and he’d been forced to take a break from the insanity of running a restaurant. Bored, he’d bought some paint supplies. Oil paint.

Painting took his mind off the pain. The frustration. The setbacks he was having in the last month.

He pointed his thin brush to the corner of the medium-sized canvas. “I’m gonna do swirls of red and gold in the field and maybe the sunlight will tear through that cloud right here.”

I could see what he meant. What Derek expressed on the canvas was a manifestation of his inner world, a world I’d helped create through the years. We’d known each other since we were kids. It was hard to tell which memories were his or mine. We were like the colors on that pallet of his.

Blended, yet different in our composites.

He eyed me. “My God, you look so good in that shirt, Nick,” he said, touching the collar of the striped blue shirt I’d found at the back of our closet this morning. “You don’t wear it often.”

“We didn’t do the laundry, so I didn’t have my usual stuff to wear.”

“Oh, crap. I totally forgot.”

“It doesn’t matter. Not like it’s your job. Hey, you didn’t eat your gourmetJiffy sandwich. Lemme make you something.”

“I don’t think I can eat.”

I touched his face. “That bad today?”

“No, I’m fine.” Derek rarely complained about the massive headaches, memory loss, and general confusion he suffered each day. I knew it was because he thought I’d suffer if I heard himsuffer. He was right. I was weak that way. He was the strong one.