Henri had set two places at the end nearest the window: one at the head, one to the left of it. Close enough to require intention, far enough to suggest that whoever had made the decision had considered the geometry carefully. I sat in the left-hand chair, noted the view of the garden through the window, dark now, the post light on, the bench barely visible, and placed my napkin in my lap.
Seven o'clock came. Seven passed.
Estelle, small and efficient with the ease of someone who had been running a kitchen long enough that chaos barely registered, brought water, then bread, then disappeared without explanation. Henri appeared once at the door, looked at the empty chair, and withdrew.
I ate the bread. Looked at the garden.
At seven twenty-two, I heard the front door.
Not loud, the house had good bones, the kind that absorbed sound rather than carrying it, but I'd been listening. Footsteps in the entry hall, a brief exchange of voices too low to make out, then the footsteps again, closer, and Dominic Moreau came through the dining room door still adjusting his cuff link.
He was wearing the same category of suit as the night before, dark, well-fitted, the kind that stopped announcing itself after the first moment because it had already done what it came to do. He looked like a man who had been somewhere that required him to be entirely composed for a sustained period and had not yet decided to stop.
He saw me and didn't apologize for the lateness. Didn't perform contrition or acknowledgement. He simply sat down in the chair at the head of the table as though time were a variable he managed rather than one he answered to, and reached for his water glass.
"You ate the bread," he said.
"I was hungry."
He looked at the basket, half-empty now, and something that might have been approval moved across his face. Might have been. I wasn't certain enough to file it as that.
Estelle appeared within thirty seconds of him sitting, which told me she'd been listening too, or that she simply knew his patterns well enough not to need to. She set a plate in front of each of us without ceremony: something with duck and root vegetables, a reduction that smelled of wine and something darker. I looked at it. Looked at him.
He was already eating.
I picked up my fork.
We ate in silence for several minutes. Not uncomfortable silence, or it would have been uncomfortable, if I'd let it be. But I'd grown up in a house where silence was a frequent weather pattern, and I'd learned early that the way to survive it was not to fill it. Silence was information. What people didn't say, when they didn't say it, the shape of the quiet they maintained, all of it meant something, if you paid attention instead of panicking.
Dominic Moreau's silence was the silence of a man entirely at ease with not speaking. No performance of ease, nocompensatory focus on the food, no checking of his phone. He simply ate, and looked occasionally at the window, and occupied the space with the same economy he'd occupied my father's armchair the night before.
I was the variable in this room. He was the constant.
Somewhere around the midpoint of the main course, I arrived at a conclusion: he wasn't going to ask me anything. The dinner was a formality he was processing efficiently, the way you processed necessary paperwork — present, attentive to the mechanics, but not particularly interested in the contents.
I held onto that. Quietly.
He asked his first question without looking up from his plate.
"What were you studying?"
Not what are you studying. Past tense, clean and deliberate. He already knew I'd left something behind. Most people would have phrased it forward, from habit or courtesy. He had chosen not to. Something about it landed before I understood what it meant — and what it meant was that I'd read the dinner wrong. He wasn't processing a formality. He had been paying attention the entire time. I answered him. "Economics," I said. "Two years in. I was finishing my junior year."
Most people would have phrased it forward, from habit or courtesy. He had chosen not to. Something about it registered before I understood why.
"Two years in. I was finishing my junior year."
He nodded once. "Where."
"State school. Good program, full scholarship." I kept my voice even. "I worked for the tuition gap."
Now he looked up. Brief, assessing, not unkind, but not softened either. The look of someone recalibrating a variable.
"The coffee shop," he said.
"Three years."
He returned to his food. I returned to mine. Outside, something moved in the garden, a branch shifting, maybe, or an animal crossing the lit path. I tracked it peripherally and let it go.