Unbroken Read online




  ALSO BY MICHELLE D. ARGYLE

  The Breakaway

  Pieces (The Breakaway #2)

  Monarch

  Bonded

  Cinders

  Catch

  Out of Tune

  If I Forget You

  True Colors & Other Short Stories

  Unbroken / First Edition

  Copyright © 2015 Michelle D. Argyle

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means electronic, mechanical, printing, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Summary: “Fourteen years after her kidnapping, Naomi seeks closure with each of her former kidnappers.”

  This book is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales, is entirely coincidental.

  Edited by Diane Dalton

  Cover Design by Melissa Williams Cover Design

  Cover photograph (girl) © 2015 by Ilazo, Shutterstock

  Author Photo by Meg Hall Photography at

  http://meghallphotography.blogspot.com/

  Visit author Michelle D. Argyle at

  http://michelledargyle.com/

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  I

  II

  III

  IV

  V

  VI

  VII

  VIII

  XI

  X

  XI

  XII

  XIII

  About the Author

  I

  September

  “This is one of those days,” Naomi said as she removed her chef’s hat, set it on a nearby chair, and began unbuttoning her stiff, white jacket.

  Alan, the restaurant manager and owner, grinned at her. He was Italian, with deep olive skin, black hair, and warm brown eyes. “One of ‘those days’? But today’s your last day. Was it really so bad?”

  They were standing in Alan’s office across from the main kitchen. The sharp scent of garlic permeated the air, glazed with the warm aroma of yeast from the starter dough for tomorrow’s baguettes.

  “No, it wasn’t bad. That’s not what I meant.” Naomi sucked on her bottom lip as she untied her neckerchief then slipped off her chef’s jacket and draped both over her arm. The jacket was stained with sauce and butter and who knew what else. She wasn’t usually this messy in the kitchen, but she had been training the new head chef for the past nine hours. She glanced up at the ceiling.

  “I don’t know how to explain it,” she said. “Days like this are supposed to feel important, but then they’re never what I expect.”

  Alan’s dark eyebrows came together in a thoughtful frown. They were speckled with a hint of gray that had yet to show anywhere else. He snapped his fingers. “You mean milestones,” he said as he leaned against the edge of his desk. “Right?”

  Naomi nodded, but felt the word “milestone” wasn’t quite right. Today marked her last day at La Preferita, the Italian restaurant where she had worked for the past five years. She’d made it all the way up to head chef, but now there were even better things on the horizon. The day was over, her last hour worked, her last goodbye only seconds away. It felt ordinary, not like a milestone at all.

  She wasn’t sure how to explain to Alan that it was one of “those days” simply because it fell flat in comparison to what it should be.

  For her, milestones were not foreseeable, or even anticipated. They slammed into her out of nowhere, like the day almost seven months ago when Alan had called her into his office and offered her a job in Rome, starting as soon as she could get a work visa. His brother owned several restaurants there, one of which was slowly going under due to poor management.

  “Do you want the position?” Alan had asked.

  Bam! Milestone.

  Or then there was the day she had graduated from USC with a BS in Business Administration and had gone to celebrate at a local pizzeria with Finn, her boyfriend at the time. She had looked down at the pizza on her plate, disappointed in the quality of the pale, under-baked crust and the too-sweet sauce, and realized she felt more passionate about figuring out how to make a perfect pizza than about figuring out how to save her complicated long-distance relationship with Finn.

  Bam! Milestone.

  It was a mediocre pizza, not her hard-earned diploma, that had cemented that day in her heart.

  “I’m sad to see you go,” Alan said as he stepped away from his desk and gave her a brief hug. “But you’ve been veering toward management for the last few years, and Gianni needs someone like you over there. The restaurant will sink without a competent manager. I know you’re the one.”

  Naomi hugged him back. He smelled like pastry dough, the same way he’d smelled the first day she had met him five years ago in this same office, when she was fresh out of a New York culinary school, her head full of grand expectations of what her career would be like in a professional kitchen.

  “I’m happy I listened to my father,” she said as she stepped away from Alan. “That business degree is paying off after all. Who knew I’d end up wanting a management position even more than head chef?”

  “Your culinary background is invaluable too. With business experience, it is brilliant. Your father is a smart man to have helped you down that path.”

  Naomi caught the sparkle in Alan’s eyes. Her father was much more than a smart man, and Alan knew it. Her father was a global business giant, now more so than ever, even close to his retirement. If he chose to retire, which didn’t seem likely.

  “Good luck, Naomi. Give me a call when you’ve settled in.”

  “I will.”

  As she walked out into the parking lot, she took a deep breath of salty air and smiled. La Preferita had been exactly what she’d wanted after culinary school: a job in a restaurant south of San Francisco, right near her parents’ house. She had her own apartment, her own life, and she had built it step by step, falling at times, but always getting up again. Nobody she met now cared about her past because nobody knew about it. She had changed her last name a long time ago, something she wished she had done right after the trial that had put her kidnappers behind bars. She hadn’t realized back then how straightforward it could be to change her life. Finn had helped her see that.

  He’d helped her through so many things. She wondered what he was doing now.

  Slipping into the driver’s seat, she tossed her hat and other clothes on the back seat and started the engine. She pulled out her phone and scrolled down to Finn’s phone number. The last time she had called him, she had been in Parma, Italy during a nine-week study abroad course as part of her culinary schooling almost six years ago.

  She remembered it clearly, sitting in her small, dorm-like room with her roommate, Lindsay, her hands sweating as she looked out the window at a building across the street. It looked so much like the apartment building where she and Jesse, her former kidnapper, had stayed so long ago when she’d run away with him to Rome. The building was tall and ancient and pale yellow. What had she been thinking going back to Italy to study cuisine with all those memories of Jesse wrapping around her, squeezing?

  Nobody had figured out who Naomi was or what she had been through, or why she refused to go out with them on the weekends to clubs and shops and landmarks.

  But then she had called Finn and they’d talked for three hours straight and Naomi had asked herself why they had both decided to break up before she’d started culinary school. But deep down she knew why. Their relationship had been rocky before then, stretched too thin between Massachusetts and California, filled with emails and texts and chats and hurried visits here and there. Their
new, inexperienced love simply wasn’t strong enough to withstand the distance, and nothing would change that. Finn was wrapped up in school at Harvard, and Naomi had her own grand ambitions. Other things had simply mattered more.

  Still, almost eleven years after she’d kissed Finn on the beach the night they’d decided to take a chance on each other, she missed his friendship—that closeness she had yet to find again with anyone else she’d dated.

  But she had to move on, especially now. It was possible. There were great things on the horizon to distract her.

  Turning off her phone, she tossed it onto the passenger seat and backed out of the parking stall. Finn was in the past, like everything else. Her past had shaped her into who she was today. It still shaped her. But she could never go back to it, and that was okay. She was thirty-two now. She had moved on long ago, and it was time for another leap forward.

  II

  Situated on the northern outskirts of Rome, the Bella Fonte restaurant was crammed between an ancient-looking bookshop and a tailoring business. Seven round tables sheltered by scalloped, cream-colored umbrellas were arranged just outside the restaurant’s black double doors, each table hugged by four wrought-iron chairs. The building had once been an apartment complex and still housed a few employees on the top floor. Naomi would be one of them.

  She stood in front of the restaurant with her suitcases, taking a deep breath.

  This was it. Her new life. She surveyed the picturesque scene before her, surprised by how different it felt to stand in front of it compared to staring at the photos Gianni had sent her a month ago. The photos had been nothing but a two-dimensional concept. Here she could sink her teeth into it, like an al dente noodle.

  Gianni Giordano was the restaurant owner—a tall, brusque man with leathery skin and paper-white hair that stood out on the sides of his head like little wings. He was a lot older than his brother Alan. Naomi had first met him during her study abroad in Parma. He had been invited as a guest instructor, breezing into the kitchen wearing a black chef’s uniform, his flurry of white wings crushed beneath his towering hat.

  “You have learned nothing until today!” he had cried out to the class in rapid Italian Naomi could hardly understand at the time, clapping his hands twice in case his booming voice hadn’t caught their attention. “Today you will begin to learn everything.”

  That was Gianni—a culinary genius with an ego to match—and now Naomi had the chance to manage one of his restaurants. It was a dream come true.

  But it was also overwhelming. She smoothed her rumpled blouse, damp with sweat from the humid Roman September air, and stepped into the restaurant. She was greeted by a woman in her early twenties who introduced herself as Elena.

  “You are Naomi Chapman?” she asked in Italian.

  Naomi smiled and nodded. It was still strange to hear her new last name in any accent. Chapman was her mother’s maiden name, so it felt foreign and familiar at the same time.

  Elena pressed her hands together. “We are so glad to have you here.” She leaned so close that her dainty nose and chestnut-brown hair blurred in Naomi’s vision. “Gianni says you speak Italian, but you are American, correct?”

  Naomi’s brain processed the words slowly but surely. She’d studied Italian at USC and in Parma, and she’d tried to stay in practice over the past few years, but she would hardly claim to be fluent, especially with different dialects. Alan had told her it would only take a month or two for her to sink into it completely and feel comfortable.

  For a brief moment, she thought of Jesse speaking Italian to a woman with black hair pulled into a bun. Each word out of his mouth was slow, careful, and precise. Naomi spoke better than he did now, at least.

  Where had that memory come from?

  She looked down at her luggage, the name on the tag written with her loopy handwriting: Naomi Chapman. That was who she was now. Not Naomi Jensen. The last thing she needed to think about was Jesse.

  “Yes,” she replied in Italian, Jesse vanishing from her mind like a puff of smoke. “I am not as fluent as I’d like, but I will learn.”

  Elena flashed a perfect smile. “I love your American accent,” she swooned. “Gianni has told us all about you. He says you will bring a new spin to our restaurant. Modern and efficient and fun, like your restaurants in America!”

  “I hope so,” Naomi laughed. “I had a long talk with him a few days ago. He’s worried you are … what’s the word …” She lifted her hand and spread it flat in the air. “Stale?” she tried in English. “Stagnant?”

  “Ah, yes, I know what you mean. Yes, that is right. Agnese had her baby and we couldn’t find another experienced manager. The rest of us had to figure things out on our own. We stopped growing. Gianni is too busy.”

  “Is he here today? He said he wanted to meet with me, and he needs to come with me to sign paperwork for my work visa.”

  “He’s on his way. Let me show you to your apartment upstairs.”

  “Wonderful, thank you.”

  Naomi followed Elena through several narrow hallways and then up a stairwell that smelled like cheese and flour. It wasn’t a bad smell. When Naomi had first come to Italy, she had thought it all smelled wet and rotten. Now she knew it was the smell of an aging city, of old buildings and stones and bricks baking in the sun, vegetation thriving in the humidity. Here, in a working restaurant, those smells fused together with the constant aroma of cooking food. It was thick and permeable and Naomi let it sink into her like ink on a page.

  There was a hallway at the top of the stairs. Naomi followed Elena to the end of it and smiled as the woman opened a door and swept her hand into the room. “Your new home, Ms. Chapman,” she said, and made a little bow. “We are so happy you are here.”

  Naomi walked into the room and took a deep, satisfied breath. It was small, with apricot-colored walls, a narrow window overlooking a little courtyard behind the restaurant, and one twin-sized bed.

  “The bathroom?” Naomi asked.

  “Oh! It is shared,” Elena said, pointing back down the hallway. “Is that a problem?”

  Naomi remembered her days in culinary school in New York. It had been a dorm setting there. She could deal. “Not at all. I’ll get settled now. Could you tell me when Gianni arrives?”

  “Certainly.” Elena bowed her head and then backed out of the doorway, closing the door behind her.

  Naomi continued into the room and set her luggage on the bed. She sat down on the edge of the mattress and pulled out her phone to call her mother, who had been worried sick since the moment Naomi had told her she was moving to Italy. She was the one person in Naomi’s life who didn’t think Italy was a good idea because of her past there with Jesse. She was afraid it would bring back too many painful memories.

  Naomi was dead-set on proving her wrong, but couldn’t quite bring herself to make the call.

  III

  October

  After a two-day rainstorm the air smelled fresh and clean. Naomi opened her window and took a deep, satisfying breath. A grin spread across her face. She hadn’t been outside in almost a week, and it wasn’t because of the rain. Between dealing with customer complaints, resolving close calls with health code violations, and trying to keep every employee happy and working efficiently, she simply hadn’t had the time. The demands of her job were more intense than she anticipated. Bella Fonte had seemed like it was running smoothly when she’d first arrived, but the longer she worked under its roof, the more problems she uncovered.

  Despite all of that, she welcomed the intensity with open arms. Every single bit of it made her blissfully happy.

  She leaned over the windowsill and looked down at the small courtyard below. Several gray pigeons tiptoed over the damp cobblestones, their soft coos mixing pleasantly with the rustle of leaves trembling in the cool breeze. The rich, moist scent of fall seemed to have ridden in on the storm, and Naomi guessed it was here to stay.

  Turning away from the window, she dressed and then
went downstairs to inspect the dining area, making sure everything was in perfect order for another busy day. In less than a month she had managed to increase profit by fifteen percent and planned to increase it another fifteen percent in the next six weeks. She was in the middle of refolding a napkin in the shape of a leaf when the head chef, Cecily, came into the dining room from the kitchen.

  “Ah, there you are,” she said in brusque Italian. She was a tall, slightly pudgy woman with a constant irritated expression on her face, as if every breath she took reeked of something horrid. Naomi had learned quickly that her looks were deceiving. Cecily was actually a rather sweet woman who had no idea people often perceived her as unfriendly.

  “Yes?” Naomi asked, arranging the napkin precisely on the table.

  “About the new menu,” Cecily began as Naomi followed her back toward the kitchen.

  “Is there a problem with it?” Naomi interrupted. “Do you want to discuss including the involtini again? I thought you—”

  “No, no, it is not the beef,” Cecily said quickly. “It is the white truffle risotto. Michel says there are no white truffles available at a decent price right now. Should we take it off the menu?”

  “Perhaps Michel isn’t looking in the right places,” Naomi sighed. “All of his suppliers are related to him, and if they don’t have something, he pretends no one has it. Have you checked the market around the corner? I’ve seen the head chef from Silvano’s buying white truffles there, and I heard the owner say she has a supplier in Umbria who sells them this time of year. I doubt she marks them up as much as Michel.” Naomi rubbed her hands together and gave Cecily a knowing smile. “We’ll need to develop a good working relationship with her before she’ll sell us something so valuable, though. I’m surprised you haven’t already done that since it’s part of your job to make those kinds of connections. I’m going to depend on you for that.”