Seven months before the outbreak, Ryan and I moved to a small town south of Seattle with the dream of opening a restaurant there. His mother had been second-generation Greek-American, his father Sicilian, and he wanted to open a Mediterranean restaurant—lots of lamb dishes and feta cheese from his mother’s side of the family and flatbreads and fish stews from his father’s. He was ready to step up and we both knew that wasn’t going to happen in the big city where the kitchen competition was cutthroat. We had a business plan, we had backers, and we’d scraped together the money to buy a funky old warehouse building in the heart of our new home’s “old town.” The city didn’t have much to attract tourists, but cruise ships on their way to Alaska stopped here, and we fig...

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