Not challenging. Genuinely asking because the way it was set up before put the high use items on the low traffic side, Daniel said without looking up. Three extra steps per prep, maybe four. Over an 8-hour service that adds up to about 40 minutes of lost time across the kitchen. This way, we recover about 30 of them.
Silence. He looked up. Victoria Hayes was watching him with an expression he couldn't fully read. Who asked you to do this? She said, "Nobody," he said.
Another silence. "What's your name?" "Daniel Brooks, kitchen supervisor." She wrote something in her portfolio. "Don't change it back," she said, and moved on.
That had been their first exchange. 3 years later, she was standing in the rain outside his workplace at 10:43 at night, and she had just told him she hadn't come for his work. "You should get out of the rain," Daniel said finally. It came out more gently than he intended. Probably Victoria agreed without moving.
He noticed then that her expression, usually so contained, so professionally armored, had something unfamiliar in it. Something that looked, if he was reading it right, like vulnerability. The kind that shows up when someone has driven somewhere and parked and gotten out of the car and walked into the rain before they could convince themselves. This was a terrible idea. Ms.
Hayes. Victoria, she said. Please, he paused. He had called her Ms. Hayes for 3 years.
Every employee did. Even Marcus, the general manager who had known her for a decade, called her M. Hayes. It was not a rule, she had stated. It was simply what the distance between her and the people who worked for her naturally produced.
"Victoria," he said. And the word felt strange in his mouth in the best possible way. "It's almost 11:00. I know what time it is. I have a train to catch.
I'll drive you. Daniel looked at her. That's not I'm aware it's not required, she said. I'm offering anyway. He was quiet for a moment.
The rain was coming down harder now. He could feel it soaking through his coat. The sensible thing, the thing a man who kept his personal life at a careful distance from his professional one would do was to say, "No thank you." Walk to the train station and spend the 40-minute ride home thinking about what had just happened. Instead, he said, "My daughter is with my neighbor.
I need to be home by midnight." "Okay," Victoria said simply. "I'm not asking for anything," he said. "And he meant it the way a man means something when he's been asked for things his whole life in ways that were never really question. I just want you to understand that."