He turned around slowly. Victoria Hayes was standing 15 ft away from him in the rain and she was not holding an umbrella. Victoria Hayes was 53 years old. Though most people who met her in a professional context assumed she was younger, not because she tried to look it, but because she carried herself with the kind of sharp, deliberate energy that didn't leave room for aging to register. She had built her restaurant group, Hayes Hospitality Partners, from a single struggling bistro she'd bought at auction 17 years ago into a portfolio of 11 establishments across Chicago, Milwaukee, and Indianapolis.
She had been profiled in the Chicago Tribune, featured in Black Enterprise, and had turned down two acquisition offers in the past 3 years because, as she'd told the reporter who asked, "I didn't build this to hand it to someone else." She was wearing a charcoal blazer over a white silk blouse that was getting progressively more transparent in the rain. Her natural hair, a crown of tight coils she'd stopped relaxing 8 years ago and never looked back was collecting raindrops. Her heels were planted in a puddle that she was either not noticing or had decided not to care about. She looked, Daniel thought, like a woman who had made a decision and arrived before she could talk herself out of it.
Miss Hayes, he said it carefully. The way you say the name of someone when you're not entirely sure the situation you're in is real. What are you doing here? I came to see you, she said. Simple, direct.
No apology in it. Daniel looked around the alley as if checking whether there were cameras or other people or some explanation for what was happening that he was missing. There were none. My shift is over, he said. He didn't mean it rudely.
He meant it practically. The way a man who has spent his entire adult life in the service industry means it my shift is over as in there's nothing left here for you to need from me at this hour. Victoria smiled and it was not her CEO smile. He had seen that one enough times to recognize it polished and controlled and designed to put people at ease while revealing absolutely nothing. This was different.
This was smaller, quieter. I know she said. Daniel stood very still. Then why are you here? Victoria looked at him for a moment.
Really looked at him. The way people rarely look at each other in a city that moves as fast as Chicago. And she said, "Because I didn't come for your work." The rain kept falling. Daniel didn't move.
And the thing was the thing that he would turn over in his mind for the next several days, unable to shake it loose, was that some part of him, some deep and carefully buried part of him that he'd been ignoring for years, understood exactly what she meant, and it terrified him. He had met Victoria Hayes for the first time 3 years earlier during what she called a surprise operational visit, and what the staff called, with considerably less diplomacy, the audit from hell. Daniel had been at Aara's Kitchen for three years at that point, having taken the kitchen supervisor position after a recommendation from a former colleague. The job paid well, enough to cover rent, his daughter's school expenses, and the steady stream of small emergencies that seemed to organize themselves into a queue outside the door of every single parent's life. He had not in 3 years been late to a single shift.
He had not in 3 years called in sick. He had not in 3 years requested a personal day. He had covered other people's shifts. He had trained four new kitchen staff members who had been thrown into the deep end with no preparation and had quietly made sure none of them drowned. He had repaired a malfunctioning dishwasher at 11:00 at night using a video tutorial on his phone and a set of tools he'd borrowed from the maintenance closet, saving the restaurant close to $2,000 in emergency service fees.
None of this was in his job description. None of it came with additional compensation. He did it because the restaurant needed it done and because Daniel Brooks had been raised by a hold him that the quality of your character showed up not in what you did when people were watching but in what you did when they weren't. Victoria had arrived on a Tuesday afternoon in October unannounced with a leather portfolio and the kind of expression that made floor managers immediately start reviewing whether they'd filed their inventory reports correctly. She had walked through the kitchen during prep, asking questions in a tone that was not unkind, but was absolutely precise.
And the staff had answered in the careful way that people answer when they're not entirely sure what the right answer is. She had stopped in front of Daniel. He had been breaking down a prep station, reorganizing it in a way that was more efficient than the layout the restaurant had been using since it opened. Why are you doing it that way? She asked.