The sauce was wrong.
Not catastrophically wrong. Not throw-it-out, start-over wrong. Just slightly, stubbornly, infuriatingly wrong in a way that only Gus could detect, the kind of flaw that lived somewhere between the reduction and the finish, a flatness where there should have been brightness, a hesitation in the flavor where there should have been conviction.
He tasted it again. Set the spoon down. Picked it up. Tasted it again.
"Chef." Matthieu's voice came from the pass, tight and careful the way everyone's voice got after nine p.m. on a Friday. "Table seven is asking about the duck."
"Table seven can wait thirty seconds."
"They've been waiting fourteen minutes."
"Then thirty more seconds won't kill them."
He added a few drops of vinegar. Tasted. Closer. Added a pinch of salt so small it barely existed. Tasted again.
There. Not perfect. But close enough to plate.
"Fire the duck," he said. "And tell me where Renaud is."
Silence. That particular silence that meant nobody wanted to be the one to say it.
Gus set down the spoon and turned around.
The station was empty. Renaud's station, the fish station, the station that was supposed to be firing three portions of sea bass in exactly four minutes for the table that was already unhappy about their wait, was empty except for a pan left on medium heat and a cutting board with an unfinished brunoise slowly oxidizing in the air.
"Where," Gus said, "is Renaud."
"Bathroom, Chef," said young Clara from garde-manger, not looking up from her plates.
"How long."
"Maybe. Ten minutes?"
Gus walked to the fish station. Looked at the sea bass portions sitting raw in their hotel pan, cold and inert, not even salted. He picked up a fish. Pressed it with one finger. Felt the resistance, the quality of it, the fact that this was a fifty-euro piece of protein that Renaud had not bothered to salt, had not bothered to take out of refrigeration at the right time, had simply abandoned in a pan on a half-lit burner.
He set it down.
He walked back to his station. He looked at the pass, where tickets were stacking up, where Matthieu was watching him with the careful eyes of someone who has learned to measure the distance between quiet and explosion. He looked at the dining room through the small square window in the kitchen door, at the tables full of people who had paid three hundred euros a head to eat in his restaurant, including the man at table twelve who Gus had recognized the moment he walked in, the man whose face appeared in a magazine twice a year when he destroyed a restaurant with four sentences and a score out of twenty.
He had known the inspector was coming. He had known for two weeks, or suspected, and had run his team harder and himself harder and pushed every element of every dish until the kitchen felt less like a place of work and more like a held breath.
And Renaud was in the bathroom.
"Get Renaud out of the bathroom," Gus said quietly. "Right now. Tell him if he is not at his station in sixty seconds I will personally walk in there and drag him out, and I will not care what he is doing."
Clara put down her tweezers and walked quickly toward the back.
Gus seasoned the sea bass himself. He got the pan properly hot. He laid the portions skin-side down and pressed them flat with a fish spatula with the mechanical, efficient movements of someone who has done this ten thousand times in ten thousand services. While they cooked he fired the duck for table seven, checked the temperature on the beef going to table three, caught a sauce that Théo was about to finish incorrectly and corrected it without a word, just took the spoon from his hand and added the butter in three separate additions instead of one.
Renaud appeared at the fish station looking pale and faintly hostile, the way people look when they know they have failed and have decided that offense is better than contrition.
"Chef, I was only gone for—"
"I don't care," Gus said. "Finish your fish. Then come see me after service."
"It was an emergency, I—"
"After service, Renaud."
He didn't raise his voice. He had learned years ago that raising his voice accomplished less than he wanted and cost more than he intended. He had learned it the hard way, through the expressions of people who looked at him with something that was not quite fear but not quite respect either, something in between that satisfied no one including himself.
The sea bass plated clean. Table twelve would get their fish in ninety seconds, cooked correctly, finished correctly, plated the way Gus had drawn in his notebook three weeks ago when he was planning the menu revision.
He watched the plates go out.
He went back to tasting his sauce.
The rest of service passed the way services always passed when something had already gone wrong: through controlled escalation, through the specific violence of professional cooking where every problem was a small emergency and every emergency was solved by going faster, tasting more, sleeping less. By ten-thirty the dining room was winding down. By eleven the last ticket was plated. By eleven-twenty the kitchen crew was breaking down their stations in the particular silence of people who were too tired to speak and too professional to leave until the work was done.
Renaud was gone. He had slipped out somewhere between the last ticket and the breakdown, and Gus registered his absence with a flatness that surprised him.
He wasn't even angry anymore. That was the thing. He stood at his station wiping down the surface with a side towel, watching his crew move around him, and he felt nothing except the specific exhaustion of a man who had been running at one hundred percent for so long that he had forgotten what ninety felt like.
Matthieu appeared at his elbow. "Table twelve asked to speak with the chef."
"Tell them I'm busy."
"Gus. It's Leconte."
He stopped wiping. Leconte. The inspector. The man with the magazine column and the score out of twenty and the ability to add or remove a star with a single paragraph.
He should go out. He should untie his apron, straighten his jacket, walk into the dining room with his face arranged into something that looked like a person who enjoyed cooking for other people. He should say thank you and accept whatever Leconte was about to tell him with grace and professionalism.
He stood there.
"Tell him I'm unavailable," he said.
Matthieu stared at him.
"Tell him I'm sorry and that I'm unavailable and that I hope he enjoyed his meal."
"Gus, that's—"
"I know what it is."
He untied his apron. Not to go to the dining room. He took it off and dropped it on the pass, and he walked to the back of the kitchen, through the prep area, past the walk-in coolers, out the service door into the alley behind the restaurant where the garbage bins lived and the kitchen smell was replaced by the cold February air coming off the Rhône.
He stood in the alley. He looked at the sky, which was the color of old pewter, low clouds lit from below by the city. He had been in this alley a hundred times. He had come out here to cool down, to make phone calls, to eat something standing up because he had forgotten to eat during service again.
He had not come out here to quit.
Is that what I'm doing?
He didn't go back inside.
He walked. Down the alley, out onto the street, past the restaurant's front windows where he could see Matthieu now talking to a silver-haired man at table twelve, could see the expression on Matthieu's face, apologetic and confused and trying to manage something that could not be managed. He kept walking.
The streets near the restaurant were still busy at this hour, couples and late diners and people heading somewhere with the purposeful energy of people who had somewhere to be. Gus walked without direction, his chef's whites still on under his jacket, his hands shoved in his pockets, his breath making small clouds in the February cold.
He turned a corner. Then another. He was not thinking about the restaurant. He was not thinking about Renaud or Leconte or the sauce that had been slightly wrong. He was thinking, if he was thinking about anything at all, about a meal his mother had cooked when he was seven years old, a Sunday chicken with herbs from her garden, nothing sophisticated, nothing technical, just a chicken that smelled like his childhood and tasted like the specific happiness of being in a warm kitchen on a cold day without anything being required of him.
He had not called his mother in four months.
He turned into a narrow street he didn't recognize and stopped.
The street ended in a small courtyard, which was strange because he knew this neighborhood, or thought he knew it, but he did not recognize this courtyard with its old stones and the single iron lamp above a doorway that was producing a light that was not quite the right color for a sodium lamp, not quite orange, something warmer and older and not connected to any electrical source he could identify.
He looked at it.
The light was coming from somewhere below the door. Through the gap between stone and wood, a thin line of gold, steady and sourceless.
I'm tired, he thought. That's all this is. I'm exhausted and I walked into an unfamiliar street and I'm seeing things.
The light moved.
Not flickered. Not dimmed. It moved, slowly, the way light moves when something passes through it, and as it moved it widened and the door was no longer a door with a gap of gold at the bottom but a door that was opening, a door that was swinging inward on nothing, on no one, and the light behind it was not a room, it was not a corridor, it was something that had no name in the vocabulary of a thirty-two-year-old chef standing in a Lyon alley in his chef's whites at eleven-forty on a February night.
He had time to think: This is not happening.
Then the light took him.
He fell for a long time. Or no time at all. He was not sure there was a difference.
When he landed it was in wet grass. Real grass, cold and damp against his palms, real soil beneath it, the smell of earth and something else, something green and alive that he could not name. He lay there for a moment with his cheek against the ground, cataloguing sensation the way he always catalogued flavor: systematically, from the first impression forward.
Cold. Wet. Dark sky but a different dark, without the city's glow. Stars, more stars than he had ever seen from Lyon. Silence, the kind of silence that was not the absence of sound but the presence of distance, the silence of somewhere genuinely far from other people.
He pushed himself upright.
The field stretched in every direction, rising and falling gently in low hills. In the distance, close enough to be real but far enough to be impossible, a castle sat on a ridge against the stars, lit from within, its towers catching the moonlight.
Gus looked at it for a long time.
Then he looked down at his chef's whites, which were still clean from service because he had been careful tonight, had moved without splashing, had kept his station tight the way he always kept it tight when something mattered.
He looked at his hands. The small scar on his left index finger from a mandoline slip in 2019. The callus at the base of his right thumb from years of knife work. His hands, completely unchanged, in a field somewhere that was not Lyon.
"Right," he said, to no one.
He stood up.
He started walking toward the castle.