Almost Honest

Sloane Delaney lets herself into the back alley behind Delaney Dockside with a key she never took off her ring. She wants one service. No announcement, no audience, just proof to herself that her hands still know the work. Thad Cormier is at the pass. He sees her, sets down his tongs, and says to the woman on saute: *"Caro. Tell her we're full."* They are not full. Sloane can read the board from where she is standing. *"You've got fifteen covers on the books and you're staffed for forty."* The walk-in temperature log has been blank for three days, and a health inspector is minutes from knocking on the back door. Sloane ran this kitchen for six years before she left. Then came the fire, then the insurance adjusters, then the version of her that everyone in Saltwick Cove agreed on. She has never told anybody the whole of it: she left the fryer on at the end of three weeks of doubles, with her father sick and her brother Declan out on the boat. Declan is dead. She went to Portland. Thad stayed, and has been holding the place together alone ever since. Coming back means all of it at once. Caro Bettencourt, who taught her to hold a chef's knife at sixteen, still working the same burner. Nora, her sister and co-owner, with a deadline and a text that reads like a countdown. Willis Noonan, who wants the waterfront and holds a lien on the dock. And Thad, who was twenty-three when she taught him her mother's hollandaise, and who has spent the years since deciding what she was. The bank gives them one choice: sign an operating agreement together, or watch the restaurant go into receivership. So they cook side by side. They argue in the cold room. They put a dish on the board that neither of them can say out loud without flinching. Somebody is also working against them. A stockpot that gets sabotaged. An inspector who turns up at exactly the wrong hour. And a ledger with handwriting in it that is neither hers nor her father's. *"You didn't cause the fire, Sloane." "You don't know that." "I know you."* A small-town second-chance romance told in Sloane's first-person voice, about two cooks, one restaurant, and a truth she has been protecting for three years. The romance is closed-door.