No Secrets, No Promises

Lorraine 'Rory' Picou has worked every station in her family's French Quarter restaurant and left it anyway. Eight years later she runs a bistro out of a shuttered gas station on the north shore, and she is fine. Very fine. Then Theo Marchand walks in for dinner — the sous chef she loved and lied to the summer before she left. Theo's in town to consult on a hotel kitchen and has spent eight years assuming the worst about her. He's almost right. There's a seven-year-old at home with his hands and his terrible sense of humor, and Rory never told him. He finds out from the girl herself, over a plate of beignets, while Rory's back is turned at the stove. What follows is a hot, funny, painful winter of shared custody, bad shifts, a town with opinions, and two people who have to decide whether they're co-parents, exes — or something they never got to finish.