“You have lost your entire mind,” Hortense stared at her incredulously when she told her friend.

Kendis crossed her arms and glared back at her friend and business partner. “It’s a good idea.”

Hortense snapped her head over to Tony, who was standing in the doorway next to Isiah, which, with Tony’s average height, made Isiah look even more of a giant than he already was.

Tony looked like he was watching peak entertainment, and she narrowed her eyes at him. He grimaced. “Well, I have had worse ideas.”

“Your worst idea was building a suit of armor,” Hortense huffed and then turned back to shoot Kendis a bewildered look. “This is utterly mental.”

Kendis sighed, “Look, I just have a feeling that this is going to turn out brilliant.”

Hortense pinched the bridge of her nose. “You are just doing this on a lark, Dis? And what about the shop?” She gestured to the shop all around them.

“I’m not going to manage it,” Kendis snorted. “I’m not that daft. I already have someone in mind to handle the day-to-day management. I will just handle cash flow.”

Hortense threw up her hands and then turned back to Tony as if he wasn’t just as chaotic as she was. “You can’t be letting her do this.”

Tony stood to his full height and walked over to drape an arm around Kendis’s shoulder, and he pressed a kiss to her temple. “I don’t let Kendis Black, Lady Black of Blackmere, do anything. I am reckless, not suicidal.”

Kendis snorted, “Too bloody right.”

Hortense pinched the bridge of her nose.

Kendis took out her wand and conjured the binder that she had been working on for weeks. Hyperfixation and epic levels of delusion counted for something.

The binder floated over to Hortense and she snatched it out of the air in frustration and then flipped through the papers, her eyes scanning the information rapidly. Hortense was a lot of things: fashionable, with a mind like a steel trap for business.

“Okay…” Hortense said. “This is not the worst business plan I have ever seen.”

Kendis sighed in relief, but then Hortense snapped her head up and pointed a sharp pink lacquered nail at her. “But I got notes.”

Kendis groaned, and Tony barked out a laugh. She slapped him playfully on the shoulder and then turned back to Hortense. “Something tells me that I am going to regret this.”

***

Kendis would admit in hindsight that she was used to her name and money opening doors for her when they were otherwise slammed in her face.

When she bought Enchanted Engines from Conseulo Maynard and bought out the two other businesses next to it, she was able to get things moving relatively quickly. The most trouble Kendis had was fighting with the zoning office, and even that had been significantly shortened when they had to face a team of terrifying attorneys Kendis had on retainer.

However, Kendis quickly found out that bringing her dream of having a Waffle House in Los Angeles would be an uphill battle.

First of all, buying a Waffle House was not like buying a cute little cafe and painting the walls yellow. It was a privately held, deeply controlled, family-run kingdom of hash browns. Joe Rogers Jr. was it’s chairman and Joe Rogers III was CEO, and Kendis found out, much to her dismay, that the company did not hand out franchises like party favors.

Kendis got told no so many times she could practically hear it in her sleep. She got told no politely, then firmly, and then repeatedly.

Unfortunately for them, the Rogers family had never encountered a stubborn Kendis Black before. They did not know that Kendis Black had once defeated a fascist wizarding cult with zero adult supervision, survived the British Press, married Tony Stark, and learned zoning language out of pure spite.

A Southern breakfast chain did not scare her.

Kendis flew to Georgia for meetings and brought a thick binder full of numbers, demographic breakdowns, and traffic studies. Hortense might have been the brains behind Enchanted Engines, but that didn’t mean Kendis didn’t know her shit.

She spent a lot of late nights bent over her laptop doing late-night dining gap analysis for Hollywood, East Hollywood, Los Feliz, Silver Lake, Koreatown, and the Valley.

Tony reviewed her pitch deck and said, “This is terrifyingly competent.”

It was clear that the Rogers men didn’t know what to do with a stubborn Black trans femme person in a sharp three-piece Savile Row suit who was bound and determined against all good sense and reason to open a Waffle House in Los Angeles.

“Your data and analysis are impressive, Mrs. Black,” Joe Rogers had said politely as he flipped through her binder. “However, I am still not sold on the idea. I don’t want Waffle House to become a circus.”

Kendis ignored the misgendering and returned his patronizing look with a blank stare. Because Waffle House was already a circus. The memes alone proved that. But instead of saying that, Kendis decided to point out the obvious.

“Los Angeles is already a circus,” Kendis replied, calmly. “The question is whether you want a location that understands that or one that gets eaten alive by it.”

They asked about operations.

She had answers.

They asked about staffing.

She had answers.

They asked about local management.

She smiled and thought of Dionne.

“I have someone in mind.”

Tony, in his usual way of trying to be supportive, offered to modernize the kitchen equipment one day as she was preparing for yet another trip back down to Georgia.

Kendis pinched the bridge of her nose and sighed.

“What?”

She shot him a glare. “Don’t Stark the waffles.”

Tony gave Kendis a wounded look, which she pointedly ignored.

Eventually, after months of calls, paperwork, negotiations, legal reviews, and Kendis being so stubborn that even Pepper began to look impressed, Waffle House gave her a conditional path forward.

Tony told her that they should celebrate, but instead Kendis took out her zoning binder and got to work. She knew deep down that finding the right location would make or break this Waffle House.

First, she tried Burbank because it would be close to Enchanted Engines and she knew the neighborhood pretty well.

The realtor was a relentlessly cheerful man named Brent. He showed her a former fast-casual restaurant with exposed ducts and concrete floors.

“This has great bones,” Brent said.

Kendis stood in the middle of the room, listening to the echo. “It has influencer bones.”

“That’s very desirable.”

“That’s the problem.”

Brent blinked. “You don’t want desirable?”

“I want sticky at two in the morning.”

He stared at her and Kendis shook her head. Sometimes she forgot how ridiculous LA could be.

Next was North Hollywood.

The second realtor was a cheerful woman named Marcy. She showed her a corner lot that technically had space, but the neighboring businesses included a boutique dog chiropractor, a meditation studio, and a juice bar with a mural of a crying avocado.

Tony looked around and whispered, “I think the avocado knows.”

Kendis elbowed him because this was not the time for jokes. She turned back to Marcy as she clapped her hands.

“It’s a very wellness-forward block.”

Kendis imagined Dionne trying to serve hash browns next to a place selling celery foam cleanses and knew immediately that somebody would die.

“No.”

Then came Hollywood proper.

It was too expensive, too tourist heavy, and there were too many people who would treat the Waffle House like an ironic Instagram pilgrimage. Kendis refused to build a sacred chaos temple for men named Brock who wore sunglasses indoors and said things like “content opportunity.”

Silver Lake was worse.

A realtor tried to convince her that a former vegan wine bar could be “reimagined.”

Kendis stood in the middle of the space, staring at reclaimed wood shelves and a wall that still faintly said FERMENT YOUR TRUTH.

“Absolutely not,” Kendis said as she shook her head. This location was worse than the one in Burbank, and that was saying something.

The realtor laughed nervously. “No?”

“If I put a Waffle House here, the building will reject it like a bad organ transplant.”

“She’s right,” Tony nodded solemnly. ” I can feel the kombucha ghosts.”

Koreatown had potential, but the traffic flow was wrong for what she wanted. Pico-Union had a lot she loved until the permitting complications became a hydra with six heads and an uncle in the zoning office. Highland Park had charm, but the available sites were either too small, too precious, or too aggressively claimed by people who used the phrase “neighborhood character” when they meant “I don’t want poor people eating near me after midnight.”

At one point, after the twelfth location, Kendis sat in the passenger seat of Tony’s car with her forehead against the window.

Tony glanced at her. “You know, most people would give up around now.”

“I’m not most people.”

“I know. Most people would have given up before calling the chairman of Waffle House directly.”

Kendis groaned because it was true. She wondered again if she should do this at all. Kendis had enough on her plate as it was. “Did I really need to open a Waffle House?” She could just travel back down South if she was that desperate for one, but deep down, Kendis had a feeling that this was important.

And Kendis learned the hard way to listen to her instincts.

Tony’s voice softened. “Hey.”

She did not look at him for a long moment and then she finally looked up to meet his eyes. Tony gave her a soft look as he squeezed her hand.

“You probably think this is completely mad,” Kendis sighed.

“I do think it’s insane,” Tony replied, with a grin. “But I also think you’re seeing something the rest of us aren’t yet.”

Kendis swallowed because after a lifetime of people blowing her off or ignoring her feelings, even after nearly two years since they had been married, it was still so strange to have a person just trust her in this way.

Tony shrugged, deliberately casual. “Happens all the time. It’s one of your most annoying, attractive qualities.”

Kendis huffed a laugh despite herself.

***

Then, two weeks later, she found it by accident.

She had gone to East Hollywood for a completely unrelated meeting that ended early and badly after a property owner kept calling the project “retro poverty chic,” which made Kendis leave before she committed a felony in a blazer.

She walked instead of calling Happy.

The neighborhood moved around her in layers: Thai restaurants, Armenian bakeries, old apartment buildings, bus stops, tired storefronts, murals, clinics, churches, laundromats, families, students, aunties, workers, dreamers, people who had lived there forever, people who had arrived last week, and people just trying to get through the day.

It was not polished in the way all the other locations had been. It was refreshingly alive and normal.

And then Kendis saw the for-sale sign on North Vermont Avenue.

There were two old buildings sitting there like they were waiting to be put out of their misery. It wasn’t pretty, but the street had movement. It had late-night possibility. It had transit and enough weirdness to survive.

Kendis stood on the sidewalk for a long time. She watched a bus pull up at the curb as a man yelled in rapid-fire Spanish into his phone and hurried past. Then there was a woman who walked past carrying three grocery bags and a bouquet of flowers, and a man in scrubs who trudged along looking like he personally fought a match with death and barely won.

Kendis looked at the buildings and knew this was it. It wouldn’t be a copy of the Houston Waffle House. It would be its own thing.

A Los Angeles Waffle House.

An East Hollywood Waffle House.

A place that would glow yellow at night like a warning sign and a lighthouse.

Kendis took out her phone and immediately called Tony.

He answered on the second ring. “Please tell me you didn’t buy something.”

“I found it.”

There was a pause and then Tony gave a fond and exasperated sigh. “Of course you did.”

If Kendis thought that the rest of the process would be easy from there, she swiftly learned otherwise. The fight for the property was ugly, but the fight to get the two buildings demolished was infinitely worse.

The battle for permits became the kind of bureaucratic endurance trial that made Kendis start showing up to city offices in sharper and sharper suits until clerks began recognizing her on sight and whispering, “The Waffle House lady is back.”

One zoning official made the mistake of saying, “Do we really need this kind of establishment in East Hollywood?”

Kendis immediately clocked what the official wasn’t saying. She felt the low-boiling annoyance spike into real anger. Pepper, who sat beside her and who had come along as moral support and corporate intimidation, closed her eyes like she was praying for strength.

Kendis smiled sweetly, “What kind of establishment do you mean?”

The man sensed danger but not quickly enough. “I just mean the area is changing.”

“Yes,” Kendis said. “And I’m trying to make sure some of that change includes affordable food, late-night jobs, community access, and a place where working people can sit down after midnight without paying twenty-six dollars for toast arranged by tweezers.”

Pepper’s mouth twitched as the man awkwardly shuffled his papers.

Kendis leaned forward because watching this man squirm was her reward for enduring this bureaucratic hell. “So again, what kind of establishment are you talking about,?”

Kendis finally got her permits, and the zoning office was finally free of her.

She suspected that Pepper had done something behind the scenes but she didn’t ask and Pepper did not volunteer the information.