Her Best Friend Paid In Full

Ever since he found out my family owns a Michelin-starred restaurant in the heart of downtown, my girlfriend’s male best friend had practically moved in.

He dined there nearly every night, bringing clients, friends, and hangers-on for tasting menus that ran easily four figures a head. For three solid months, he ate like royalty. And for three solid months, he never signed a single slip or touched a bill.

I let it slide only because of Giselle. She was my fiancée in all but name, and whenever the ledger started looking absurd, she would smooth it over with sweet talk, bringing me expensive coffee or sliding a gift across my desk. So I kept my mouth shut.

Until the night of our annual Autumn Harvest Gala.

My phone lit up with an incoming call from him. The second I tapped the screen, Theo Dalton’s voice came cutting through the speaker, breathless with indignation.

"Elliot, what kind of ridiculous operation are you running down there? My family dinner tonight came out to forty-three thousand, eight hundred dollars. I asked the manager to round off the eight hundred—just clean up the change as a courtesy to a regular—and he looked at me like I’d insulted his mother."

He scoffed, sharp and patronizing. "I’ve been keeping your dining room packed for ninety days straight. If you don't actually want my business, you could have just had the spine to tell me to my face."

A cold, vicious pulse throbbed behind my temple. The veins in my forehead burned.

"His business?"

Over the last ninety days, not a single dollar had cleared under his name. Nearly three hundred thousand dollars in unpaid tabs was sitting on my personal house ledger, bleeding red ink into my quarterly reports. And he had the nerve to claim he was doing me a favor?

My hands shook as I pulled up the point-of-sale terminal on my tablet, exported the uncollected balance, and sent him the screenshot.

I hit the microphone button, my voice dropping into a razor-thin drawl. "Since when does 'keeping my dining ro