I sat in my living room, my laptop open in front of me, tweet number two burning up.
Luckily, Danny had a consultation for a project on Central Park West so it wasn’t hard to get him out of the apartment quickly, leaving me alone to sit there in my egg chair—a mid-century purple swivel seat that I purchased for too much money shortly after A Little Sunshine was picked up to series. I normally loved sitting in my chair. I was oddly attached to it, considering it was as ugly as it had been pricey. Though, at that moment, even my favorite chair was giving me hives. Well, it probably wasn’t the chair. It probably was the tweets.
To elucidate on the “I’m a fraud thing,” here’s Exhibit 1: #aintnosumshine
And there was a photograph. It was a photograph of a splashy tear sheet from my first cookbook—A Little Sunshine: Recipes from a Farmer’s Daughter. A tear sheet with my signature recipe. Tomato pie. A modern take on the Southern classic: a cracker-thin crust strewn with juicy heirloom tomatoes, balsamic vinegar, fresh basil, pine nuts, and layers of creamy mozzarella cheese. It had garden fresh herbs, cracked pepper, and my trademark: citrus in place of salt.
Except my name was crossed out on the top and, in thick black marker, the name Meredith Landy was written instead.
Meredith Landy was my executive producer Ryan’s wife. She was a former sous-chef at Babbo who had long ago traded in her thankless restaurant hours to move to Scarsdale, where she spent too many hours redesigning her thousand-square-foot home kitchen—first to mirror Diane Keaton’s kitchen in Something’s Gotta Give, then to mirror Ina Garten’s barn-kitchen.
She was also, as I thought only two other people in the world knew, the recipe’s actual creator. Two to 2.7 million in the blink of an eye. I had to fight to keep my balance.
“I’m trying to get Twitter on the phone!”
I turned in my chair as Violet, my assistant, walked into the apartment, carrying two Starbucks coffees, her cell phone glued to her ear.
“Fucking West Coast hours,” she said. “I’ve been on hold forever. Is Ryan here yet?”
“Do you see him?” I said.
Violet handed me a coffee, plopping down onto the sofa, unfazed by the harsh tone. She was twenty-four, five foot eleven, with wild red hair, a gorgeous smile, and a detailed plan to build her own empire (Once Upon a Vegan) by the time she was twenty-eight. She loved to say that when she did, she would be a lot rougher on her Violet than I was.
“Ryan called from the car. He’s sending out Meredith’s statement,” she said. “She had nothing to do with your signature tomato pie or any of your recipes . . . Sunshine has been hacked, yada, yada . . .”
“Who do you think wrote it?”
She stood up. “Hello?” she said into the phone. She paused. “Who are you?”
She started pacing the length of the loft—the open kitchen to the living room—floor-to-ceiling steel windows lining her way. Danny had designed the apartment around those steel windows, their clean lines framing the brick building across the street, an eighteenth-century tea distributor, the etched white LAPPIN TEA on the front still announcing itself.
“No! I need Craig . . .” she said, screaming at the person on the phone.
I turned back to my computer, read the most recent replies to the Meredith Landy tweet.
@sunshinecooks Is this true? #Whatthefuck
@sunshinecooks Thought u were too skinny. #realchefseat
@sunshinecooks Dear Sunshine, you’re a monster.
The monster bit felt like a serious overreaction, and for the first time, I was glad to be locked out of my system so I didn’t say something to @kittymom99 that I later regretted. I closed the Twitter window and went back to crafting responses for the rest of my social media avatars. I had a staffer who ran each of these. But I was not about to trust a twenty-five-year-old Holyoke grad to deliver a message to my 1.5 million Facebook friends.
“They’re shutting it down!” Violet yelled out. “Craig is shutting it down!”
I looked up to see Violet doing the moonwalk over the Persian rug, dancing her way past the windows—as Ryan walked in the front door, arriving, as he always did, just in time to take credit.
“They’re shutting it down,” he said, like Violet hadn’t just reported as much.
Ryan Landy. Columbia Law and Business School, newly forty, and chiseled everywhere: jaw, chin, shoulders. He was in his uniform of jeans and a sports coat, his shirt one-button-too-open. Since turning forty, he had adopted the forced-casual addition of hipster sneakers, which added to his perfect mix of little-boy good-looking, sleazy, and something (charming, deceitful) that made pretty much every woman he’d encountered putty in his hands—including his wife, Meredith, who seemed unable to do anything except forgive him for those other women.
Violet, still on the phone, put her hand over the receiver. “I’ve got Craig,” she said. “Should be down in thirty seconds.”
“Should’ve been down THIRTY SECONDS AGO, Craig,” Ryan said, loud enough for Craig to hear.
Violet plugged her ears. “What was that, Craig?” she said, scurrying away.
Ryan headed toward my egg chair, twirled me around, and offered his half-smile. Charming.
“Are you hungry?” he said.
“Am I hungry? Ah . . . no.”
He headed toward the kitchen. “Well, you better have something to eat in this place . . . ’Cause I’m starving,” he said.
Ryan reached into my refrigerator and pulled out a green juice, a hard-boiled egg. Then he jumped up onto the countertop, taking a seat. My gorgeous gray slate countertop: stunning beside the glass refrigerator, the eight-burner stove, and stainless steel ovens.
It was a chef’s kitchen in every way, even if I was a true chef in none.
He popped the entire egg into his mouth. “Don’t look so nervous,” he said.
“I’m not nervous, Ryan. I’m pissed. How did this happen?”
“Kevin let it happen. But Jack spent the morning securing your other accounts with a firewall,” he said, his mouth full. “New passwords, new security codes. Nobody outside this room will have them. Nobody outside Jack, that is.”
“Who is Jack?”
“The new Kevin.”
I frowned. “It’s out there now, though. People are going to think—”
“People are going to think exactly what we tell them to think,” he said. “I mean, listen to Meredith’s statement,” he said as he pulled out his phone and started reading. “My husband, the esteemed producer Ryan Landy, has worked with Sunshine Mackenzie since he discovered her first video on YouTube, making this very recipe. With the exception of being a fan (and I like to think a valued early taster), I have no claim to any of Sunshine’s scrumptious creations.”
“Why is everyone talking to me like I wasn’t the one who wrote that?” I said.
He smiled. “I’m just praising your good work.”
I nodded, but there was no relief sinking in. It had all gotten a little close. And neither of us was saying the truth out loud. Meredith was the real chef. They were her recipes. Her vision. Or, rather, Ryan’s vision, and her execution.
“You don’t think Meredith is behind this, do you?”
Ryan laughed, the thought of his wife betraying him apparently hilarious. “No fucking way!”
“What if she—”
“She didn’t. It would destroy us financially. She would never do that.”
“So, who?” I said.
Ryan shook his head. “A hacker, someone who got into your email . . .”
His nonchalance was really starting to irritate me. “How would a random get so close to the truth?”
He shrugged. “I told you, the bigger you get, the more people come after you. And someone is apparently after you. Probably with the Food Network deal, they’re excited . . .”
The Food Network deal. I hadn’t wanted to mention it. I was slated to be a cohost of a new farm-to-table cooking show. Competition shows were now the Holy Grail on the network. No one was offered a straight cooking show unless they were a movie star turned culinary star. But that’s how popular A Little Sunshine had become. The show was premiering in September—at least it was supposed to. Unless this hacker ruined everything.
Ryan jumped down off the countertop. “The point is I cut off his access. There’s nothing he can do now.”
He. Ryan said he. “You think it’s a he? That’s interesting. That’s my gut too.”
He walked up to me, so we were face-to-face, his palm gently cupping my neck. “Can we be done with this already? I have other things to discuss, okay?”
I looked away, not wanting to engage with any of his other things. “Like what?”
“Tonight. The party.”
I closed my eyes. In the chaos, I had forgotten. Danny had planned a surprise party in the back room of Locanda Verde for fifty of our closest friends.
“We should cancel it,” I said.
“Cancel it? No!”
I already knew where he was going. He was going to use my party to fix this.
“You’re going to spin the story.”
“I’ve trained you well, young Sunshine.”
I drilled him with a dirty look. But he wasn’t wrong. He had.
“I’m inviting the press. People, Us Weekly. Great opportunity to put these rumors to bed.”
Ordinarily, I would have rolled with it. But I hesitated. The hack, the day, the song—some of it, all of it, had gotten to me. And I was feeling . . . something.
“Danny doesn’t want publicity tonight. He specifically said.”
“And I care about what Danny wants, why?”
I shot Ryan a look. I wasn’t in the mood to stroke his ego—to pretend he’d won the latest battle of work husband versus real husband.
And I didn’t want to upset Danny, especially when birthdays were a big deal around here. We’d been together since we were twenty-one, college sweethearts. And every year, we tried to top the year before for each other. Danny was already irritated that I’d peeked at his email and seen the details, asked him to make a few changes to all that planning (to the guest list and the menu and the time—I did keep the venue).
“Look, you can pretend you had no idea,” Ryan said.
That was the last thing I wanted to do. While I had become somewhat of a seasoned liar over the years—a job requirement—I used to be a very honest person. And that was the person Danny knew—the one he had fallen in love with. Whenever I tried to stretch the truth with him, he would often see through it. And I didn’t want to fight.
“Handle it however you want,” Ryan said. “But we have to do this, okay?”
“Fine, whatever, just keep it under control.”
“When don’t I?” He paused, considering. “This morning notwithstanding.”
“Ryan, we have to deal with him.”
“Danny?” he said, confused.
“The hacker.”
He rolled his eyes. “I’m dealing with him! Five people at the studio are devoting all their time to figuring out which weirdo living with his mother in Idaho who jerked off to your videos one too many times did this thing.”
“Gross.”
Ryan sucked down the juice. “I aim to please.”
“Uh . . . guys?” Violet waltzed into the kitchen. “Amber is weighing in . . .”
Amber was Amber Rucci, aka Toast of the Town. A fellow culinary YouTube star. All of her dishes used toast as their base. Thick, old-fashioned brioche; salted, grainy rye. Some of her recipes were as simple as homemade almond butter on burnt brioche. Did that even count as a recipe? It counted enough that she was beloved. She was also young and attractive—and the host of the second-most popular YouTube cooking show, tracking only behind A Little Sunshine. Years ago, she had reached out and sent me an array of kitchen utensils (Let’s get cooking!!) to cement something like a friendship between us. I was more than happy to play nice too and sent her back a knife set (Your stove or mine?). Our “friendship” led to joint appearances on each other’s shows and a New York Times “Night Out” piece. On the menu was my tomato pie, accompanied by her avocado and mint toast.
Now, apparently, she wanted the world to know she wasn’t a fair-weather friend.
Believe in the power of Sunshine! #chefsunite #loveandpepper
She linked to a photograph of us on Instagram, preparing dinner in her kitchen.
Violet put her phone away. “That’s nice, right?” she said. “Why didn’t she email personally, though?”
“What good would that do?” Ryan said. “No one would have seen it!”
“I hate toast,” I said.
Ryan smiled. “There’s my girl!” he said.
“Violet, I need you to get a few tweets out in the next fifteen minutes,” I said. “Something like . . .‘Hello, guys, this is Sunshine (the real Sunshine), what a morning!’ You understand.”
She headed toward the living room. “Already on it.”
Ryan called out after her. “Use one of those inspirational quotes on Instagram about how scary it is to have someone else speaking for you, pretending to be you. How strong you feel using your own voice again. Something.”
Violet turned around. “Ooh! I have a great one from Maya Angelou!” she said.
“Did I ask you for the details?” Ryan said, waving her off. “Use a yellow background!”
“Yellow makes people think of truth,” he said.
Had I read that somewhere? Or was Ryan just so convincing when he spewed his bullshit that I not only believed it, I believed I had always believed it?
I reached for my coffee. “Good to know.”
“I could do without the sarcasm.”
“So fix it, Ryan,” I said. “What if someone starts digging around? The Food Network will pull the plug. Everyone will pull the plug!”
“Not going to happen,” Ryan said.
I looked at him, uncertain.
“We have Meredith saying it’s not true. What kind of digging makes sense after that? Besides, no one wants to open that can of worms. There are two people who have released cookbooks in the last decade who had anything to do with the actual recipes in those books. At the most, you have a celebrity who created the dishes. The recipes are worked out in a test kitchen by some ghostwriter who actually knows what he’s doing.”
“A ghostwriter who received credit,” I said.
“So you want to tell the world now that Meredith is the ghostwriter? It’s a little late to give her credit.”
I thought of what I wasn’t saying out loud—the stuff that would surely sink our little empire if it got out. “We know it’s not just the recipes,” I said.
“Sunny . . .”
Ryan’s eyes softened, and for a second, it stopped feeling like he was producing me. It felt like he was being my friend.
“We also are the only ones who know. Trust me. We are safe,” he said.
He nodded with absolute conviction.
I felt myself sinking into his assured tone. And it was enough for me to push it aside.
“We good here?” he said.
“We are,” I said, almost meaning it.
It’s amazing, after all, what you’ll ignore when you want something to be right, isn’t it? Like in this case, the truth.