The third week, something changed.
I was carrying boxes through the kitchen at La Casita de Mila on a Tuesday afternoon when the door to the dining room opened and Camila Rodriguez walked through. Not Mila. Camila. The difference was the same difference I'd seen on the last day of the vacation, the shift from warm to cold, from mi amor to something harder. But here, in her own restaurant, in her own world, the coldness wasn't a shift. It was the default. It was who she was when she wasn't performing.
She walked through the kitchen without looking at anyone. The cooks parted for her the way water parts for a stone. She spoke to the head chef in Spanish, quick and precise, and the chef nodded and she moved on. She was wearing a white blouse and dark pants and her hair was pulled back and she looked like a woman who owned a restaurant, which she did, and she looked like a woman who owned everything else, which she also did.
