An hour later found me in the sunny kitchen of two of Hollywood’s brightest stars, spooning pound cake batter into two loaf pans and shooshing Grace over to her side of the island.

“It doesn’t make sense for you to pay me money to cook if you’re doing half the work.”

“I’m like your sous chef,” Grace protested as I pulled out a kitchen stool and pointed at it.

“Sit down, relax, stay on your side of the kitchen, and I’ll let you lick this.” I held up a beater.

“It’s a good thing Jack’s not home yet; he’d never let a line like that go by,” she said with a chuckle. “But I do want to lick that, so I’ll stay over here.”

I smiled as I thought about how I held sway over one of television’s biggest stars with just a battery beater. Why couldn’t all my clients have been like her? It was silent for a few minutes while she read through a script and I worked on my lemon cakes. But she couldn’t keep quiet for too long . . .

“So they all just canceled on you? Just like that?” she asked, looking up from her papers.

I kept my eye on my loaf pans. “I shouldn’t have told you. That was incredibly unprofessional.”

“It was also incredibly unprofessional when Jack offered you a threesome for another serving of spotted dick. Unprofessional is how we roll.”

I snorted in spite of myself. I’d made a traditional English pudding one night, and Jack the Brit was beside himself. So beside himself that he really had offered his body in return for future proper English sweets.

I really shouldn’t have unloaded everything on Grace, as nice and as welcoming as she was. But somewhere between the grocery unpacking and the artichoke pruning, she’d guessed that something was bothering me. And before I knew it, the entire story had poured out.

“So your mom wants to go on The Amazing Race, huh?”

“Ugh, yes. Ridiculous idea.”

“I don’t know, I’ve seen the show a few times. Always looks fun.”

“Oh, it’s not that it doesn’t look fun. It’s just . . . hmm . . . how to explain my mother.” I paused, rapping the loaf pans against the counter to coax any air bubbles out before placing them in the oven. “She’s an eighties hippie. She got caught up in that whole second-wave thing.”

She nodded. “I remember that. Buy your peace sign earrings at Contempo Casuals.”

“Exactly.” I handed over the promised beaters and she began to lick. “But it stuck with her. She’ll tell you she’s a free spirit. I have another word for it.”

“Flakey?” she asked.

“Yep. Irresponsible. She means well, but when you’re all about the moon being in the seventh house, it’s hard to remember things like paying the electric company to keep the lights on in the actual house. Luckily, she had me. Not to mention the countless ‘uncles’ who were constantly around.”

“Ah,” she said, switching to the other beater.

“They were all nice guys; she just hated being alone. So she made sure she never was. She fell in love with any man who bothered to look twice at her.” My mother was convinced that every single man she met was The One. Or at least The Next One. And I’d seen the aftermath countless times when the guys eventually bailed, the carnage that was left behind. The crying, the yelling, the sugar bingeing, the Van Morrison playing endlessly on the record player. And then the inevitable mooning over the next guy who wandered into her hippie love snare.

“So she’s a romantic?” Grace asked.

“You say romantic, I say codependent.” I rinsed the pears in the sink. “You say romantic, I say afraid to be alone. You say romantic, I say why in the world would someone put themselves through the hassle and the heartache?”

This is exactly why I liked my relationships simple, full of sex and free of love. My trouble sleeping was a great reason to ensure men never spent the night, since it was hard enough for me to fall asleep when I was alone. Compound insomnia with another snoring human in the bed, and I’d literally never sleep. Plus, I saw no reason to stare at a man awkwardly all night after the exercise portion of the evening had concluded, so I sent them on their way. They didn’t seem to mind, and I avoided all the bullshit.

Grace looked thoughtful for a moment, and I could see her mind working. “Okay, so you don’t approach things the same way . . .”

I shook my head. “Besides my mother’s search for love everlasting, the only constant in our lives was the diner. I need a better handle on my life than that.”

“Your family’s diner?”

“Yes, my grandpa opened Callahan’s a thousand years ago. I started washing dishes there when I was ten, maybe? Gotta love that child labor. When my grandpa died, it went to my mom. It’s nothing special, just kind of a meeting place in a small town.”

“Sounds great.”

“It totally is—that’s where I realized I wanted to make cooking my career. But I never wanted to run it, not even for a short period of time. Do you have any idea how much goes into running a barely successful family restaurant? Forget vacations. Forget freedom. Forget a peaceful evening. And even if you’re home, you’re fielding calls about a broken-down mixer or a walk-in fridge that’s leaking, or a waitress whose nail broke off in the salad bowl and should we close the place down until we find it?” I sighed, exhaling the tension that always set up shop when I thought about our charming slice of Americana.

“Plus forget about having any kind of privacy—in a town like Bailey Falls, everyone knows everything about everybody. You are who you are, and they don’t let you forget it. I spent my entire childhood living in my mother’s flakey shadow, waiting to be eighteen and move away from home just to get the chance to be a kid. So for my mom to think I’d just drop everything and run home . . . oh, it just pisses me off.”