Chương 191: Vane's Phone Call

With Sarah gone and the shock of the Integration absorbed alone in a hotel room, Chris felt like a man who had run a marathon lasting a year and finally crossed the line. Body and mind had gone into a strange kind of slack. He didn't rush to think about the future and he didn't sit in the pleasure of the win. He showered, put on clean clothes, and lay down on the enormous soft bed and stared at the ceiling. The past ran through his head like film on fast-forward.

The idiot who got eliminated from Burning Kitchen over a potato dish. The prep cook in the basement at Le Château, peeling potatoes day after day, close to losing his mind. The translator on the streets of New York, running system analysis on food carts to find an idea for a team. And the world champion on a floor in Paris who had taken his heart out and put it on a plate with his teammates. He'd come a long way. His phone went off on the nightstand. An unfamiliar number, from the United Kingdom. Chris frowned.

Who, at this hour? The press? Unlikely; Sarah had shielded him from all of it. A fan? Nobody had this number. He hesitated and picked up. It might be Ethan or Kira, having forgotten something.

"Hello?" One second of silence, and then a voice he would not forget for the rest of his life — a lion's roar with that much carry in it — detonated in his ear.

"Is this Chris White?" Chris sat bolt upright, and his hand tightened around the phone. That voice.

"This is Gareth Vane." The other end gave him no room to react and kept firing.

"I watched the final. So you won? Hah. Don't imagine that means anything. The world produces champions of one sort or another every year." That same vicious, teeth-itching delivery. And Chris, for no reason he could name, wanted to laugh. He could picture Vane at the other end with his brow down, wearing the expression of a man the entire world owes money to. This novel is published on a different platform. Support the original author by finding the official source.

"I saw what you made at the end." Vane was in full flow.

"That apple pie. What happened there? The pastry's extensibility was visibly wrong, the hydration was badly controlled, and the edges were catching. And that so-called foam dessert — what was that? Molecular cooking gave that up ten years ago. Are you paying homage to antiques? It looked like the scene of a failed laboratory experiment." A continuous barrage of criticism, without one obscenity in it, and more cutting than any obscenity could have been.

The Chris of a few years ago would have wanted the floor to open, or been hit hard enough to lose his voice. The Chris of tonight listened quietly, and couldn't keep the corner of his mouth down. Because he understood. What Vane had seen were the technical flaws a broadcast camera shows. Imperfect pastry, an inelegant form. He couldn't taste, through a screen, the Normandy sunlight and the green first love and the clumsy affection that pie was carrying.

He couldn't feel how precisely that handful of minimal foam had woken a childhood memory buried deep in an old man. Vane was judging with his mind. They had won on the heart.

"You're right. It isn't perfect." Chris finally spoke, calm and completely unbothered.

"It won, though. Didn't it?" Silence again on the other end. Chris could picture Vane choking on that, and enjoyed it enormously. A full five seconds later there was something like a snort, and the voice came back lower.

"… Well done, kid." Three words, out of a man famous across the world for severity and for cruelty, and they sounded as though they'd cost him everything he had. Something in Chris's chest was squeezed gently by a warm hand. He knew that well done, kid was the highest possible commendation Gareth Vane was capable of issuing. It was worth more than any amount of press or any amount of cheering.

Because it came from the man who had originally kicked him off a cliff — and who had, in doing it, shown him the other road at the bottom.

"Don't get pleased with yourself!" As if to cover that momentary weakness, Vane's volume shot back up.

"I'm telling you, you have won one competition. The real challenge starts now. Don't you dare slacken and don't you dare start producing decorative rubbish. If you go swanning around trading on a trophy and put out a single plate that insults its ingredients, and I hear about it, I will personally fly to your kitchen and put your hat somewhere you will not enjoy. Is that clear?"" Hah —" Chris finally lost it and laughed properly.

"It's clear, Chef." He was still laughing, and he had never felt lighter.

"Now hang up and go to sleep. Or go to a kitchen and practice. Stop wasting my time, I'm busy." Vane roared it and cut the line dead. Chris listened to the dial tone with the grin still on his face. He put the phone down and lay back with his hands behind his head. Outside, Paris at night was gentle and brilliant. He had finished saying goodbye to the man who'd fled the country overnight after being eliminated from Burning Kitchen. That call from the most merciless chef alive hadn't been a judgment.

It was a late graduation certificate, issued in a very particular style.