Deacon pours another shot.


When Deacon goes back out to the dining room, he’s drunk. It’s the middle of course six, the salmon, and Scarlett’s food is uneaten on her plate. Fury rises in Deacon’s throat.

How does it look when even the chef’s wife won’t eat the food? Then he remembers that Scarlett is doing a juice cleanse. He had asked her that morning to abandon the cleanse, for him. Who in their right mind starts a juice cleanse four days before Christmas?

He bares his teeth to the table. The judge has hardly touched his food. Only Abigail and Bo Tanner are enthusiastically eating.

“How is everything?” Deacon asks.

The judge clears his throat to speak, but Deacon doesn’t want to hear it. The judge is a long-winded, pompous ass who doesn’t appreciate anything Deacon is trying to do on the plate.

Deacon sidles up behind Bo Tanner and whispers in his ear, “Stay the hell away from my wife.”

“Deacon,” Scarlett hisses. “You’re being rude.”

Deacon straightens up. “Enjoy your food,” he says. He marches back to the kitchen and passes Angie and Joel Tersigni, standing too close together in front of the walk-in fridge.

“Get back to work!” Deacon shouts at them. He goes into his office and locks the door.

Joel and Angie? he thinks. Over his dead body.

He pours another shot.


The next day, the judge calls Deacon and asks for his initial investment of a million dollars back. Deacon is hungover and contrite. He apologizes for his behavior. “Let me make it up to you tonight, Your Honor. I promise the meal of a lifetime.” Every restaurant has an off night, he says. The judge has to understand: the holidays are a fraught time for everyone.

The judge does not understand. Deacon will return his money, as per the clause in the investment contract. The judge had been the last investor Deacon needed in order to start construction nine years earlier, and in his eagerness, he granted the judge a legal rip cord, a get-out-of-jail-free card, and the judge wants to use it now-otherwise, Deacon will be hearing from the judge’s counsel, Bo Tanner.

“Yes, sir,” Deacon says.


Deacon spends the week between Christmas and New Year’s calling every regular diner he knows in hopes that one of them will want to invest in the restaurant. But these guys are savvy; they know how much the restaurant costs to run and that they likely will never see a return on that investment.

Deacon needs to find someone who cares about the restaurant for the restaurant’s sake. The only person he can think of is himself. He wires a million dollars from his personal account to the restaurant coffers. He’ll deal with the ramifications later.


He hires a private investigator named Lyle Phelan, a former NYPD detective. Lyle Phelan charges a flat fee of $30,000 for missing persons, no matter how long the search takes. He will find Jack Thorpe, he tells Deacon. Guaranteed. Detective Phelan reminds Deacon of Officer Murphy, who came to their apartment in Stuy Town so long ago. Deacon writes the check.


In the ensuing months, Deacon’s financial situation goes straight downhill. He doesn’t have a royalty check due until August, so he works on getting a proposal together for his cookbook. Buck has put him in touch with a literary agent named Kim Witherspoon, who is eagerly awaiting a submission. I’m thinking part cookbook, part memoir, she says. The world is dying to know about your personal life. She sees a bidding war in his future and an advance in the mid six figures.

Envelopes come from Nantucket Bank, but Deacon doesn’t open them. He knows the news isn’t good. Notices come from the management of his building, as he’s behind on the rent. The building’s business manager, Debi, is a huge fan of Deacon’s, and he offers her dinner for two at the Board Room, on the house, if she will give him another month’s leeway. He can’t ignore his kids, however. He writes a check to Hayes’s co-op board and pays the second half of Ellery’s school tuition.

He’s going under. By the time his royalty payments come, he will have spent the check three times over. The notes for his cookbook aren’t anything he’s willing to show anybody. Writing is hard! The world is dying to know about his personal life, but Deacon has serious reservations about discussing it. He’ll need Belinda to sign a disclaimer and she will never agree to it. Writing is really hard! He nearly failed English in high school. The notes sit in a red folder on top of his desk at work, along with the envelopes from Nantucket Bank. They are too awful now for Deacon to even look at, so he puts the envelopes away in a drawer and sends the red folder to Kim Witherspoon. Can she work with this?

Probably not, she says. He’s sent her nothing except a bunch of disjointed notes and the recipe for the clams casino dip, which has been published and reprinted nearly a dozen times over the past decade.

Maybe you should hire a writer, she says. Lots of people do it.

But that costs money he doesn’t have. He should just give the people what they want: the details of his love life, starting way back in the Dobbs Ferry High School cafeteria.

No, he can’t. He’ll stick to food.


Scarlett has been well behaved since the fiasco at dinner. Deacon checks her nightstand table: all the letters, notes, and cards have been removed, and no new ones appear. Scarlett notices him slaving over his cookbook, and she asks, Why the rush? He tells her they’re a little strapped for cash and the cookbook will likely bring in a nice advance.

Scarlett hears “strapped for cash” and comes to him with a proposal for a diet-supplement company called Skinny4Life. The prospectus suggests investors will triple their money in 90 to 120 days.

“Do we want to do this?” Scarlett asks. She sounds as though she’s expecting him to say no, but he is so desperate at this point that he needs a miracle, and who’s to say Skinny4Life isn’t that miracle? Scarlett has been drinking the stuff for weeks, and she is, in fact, very, very skinny. Deacon writes a check for a hundred thousand dollars, the last of his cash. Scarlett is elated! While he’s in a good mood, she asks if she can spend eight thousand dollars to go to the Omega Institute in Rhinebeck, New York, for a week of silent retreat in April. Deacon says yes and tells her to put the charge on his American Express.


On the ides of March, Lyle Phelan appears at the front door of the restaurant. Joel Tersigni shows him back to Deacon’s office.

Detective Phelan drops a sheaf of papers on Deacon’s desk. Jack Thorpe was living in Flanders, New York, working as a cook at a Denny’s. He rented a room, kept to himself, drank at a bar called the Alibi, and died in a one-man car crash on October 11, 1997.

“Looks like he had a heart attack behind the wheel,” Detective Phelan says. “I’m sorry I couldn’t give you better news.”

Deacon nods. Flanders, New York, is on Long Island. He was so close, Deacon thinks. So close all those years. Deacon shows Detective Phelan to the door of the restaurant; then he goes back in his office, locks the door. One perfect day with my son. That’s not too much to ask, is it? Deacon starts to cry.


Scarlett has been on her silent retreat for a day and a half when Deacon gets a funny feeling. Participants are not allowed to use their cell phones, so he can’t call her. He calls the office of the Omega Institute and says, “I’d like to leave a message for my wife, Scarlett Oliver. It’s urgent.”

“Who?” the receptionist says. She tells him there is no Scarlett Oliver registered at the institute for that week.

“How about Scarlett Thorpe?” he asks. He’s grasping at straws: Scarlett rarely uses that name.

“No, I’m sorry,” the receptionist says.

Scarlett has bought herself a week away without a phone. Where has Bo Tanner taken her? To a far-flung Caribbean island? Deacon remembers his time in St. John with Laurel. What goes around, comes around, he thinks. Scarlett isn’t doing anything that Deacon himself hasn’t done.


The next day, Deacon gets a call from a number he doesn’t recognize, and, thinking it’s Scarlett, he answers it.

It’s Julie from Nantucket Bank, whom Deacon has always thought of as Supremely Capable Julie. She’s a fan of Deacon the chef and Deacon the person, and he knows the only reason the house hasn’t been foreclosed on yet is because of her.

She says, “You’re running out of time, Deacon. The wolves are at the door.”

That afternoon, a Tuesday-the restaurant is closed-Deacon starts drinking at his apartment at noon. He leaves his apartment and goes to the only place he feels he can be anonymous: Times Square. He drinks at TGI Friday’s, then at Olive Garden. This, he thinks, is rock bottom. At Olive Garden, his credit card is declined, so he pays cash, then walks over to the Board Room, unlocks the door, and grabs a bottle of Jameson from behind the bar. Dr. Disibio will notice right away-he runs an impeccably tight ship-so Deacon leaves an IOU scribbled on a cocktail napkin. From the restaurant, he walks west and ends up at an establishment called Skirtz. He meets a dancer named Taryn, who recognizes Deacon from his TV show. Deacon asks if she has a car. Yes, she says, in the garage across the street. Deacon asks if he can use it. You can come with me, he says. We’ll go to Nantucket.

Deacon wakes up in Buck’s apartment, on the unforgiving leather sofa. Deacon’s first thought is that Buck’s decorator is a sadist. His second thought is a confused jumble of broken promises and unfulfilled obligations. He has forgotten something-but what?


He has forgotten to pick up Ellery from school. Buck painted a pretty grim picture of how sad and cold Ellery was when he went to fetch her in a taxi, and an even grimmer picture of that bitch Madame Giroux, with her stern French disapproval. Deacon’s imagination, however, is far crueler. He can see Ellery with her heavy, dark hair-hair he has brushed since she was very small-swept back in the required navy headband. He can see her plaid uniform skirt, her crisp, white blouse with the Peter Pan collar underneath her navy cardigan. Ellery hates her uniform because, even at nine years old, she has developed fashion sense, and the sameness with the other girls is an identity crusher. Scarlett adores the uniform and the school; both are reminiscent of Madeline, a book she read as a child.