"Surprises you that she's ready?"
"Surprises me that I am."
I don't answer that. It doesn't need one. I just hold her hand and walk.
Mane Street Bistro sits maybe eighty people.
Every single one of those seats is occupied.
Grace assesses this with the focused energy of a hungry woman who is not above collateral damage. "There are four people almost done at that table by the window."
"Grace, we can't just—"
"I'm not doing anything. I'm observing. Tactically."
A server cuts through the crowd with the practiced urgency of someone who has handled a gold-medal-watch-party breakfast rush before.
She's in her sixties, red apron, reading glasses on a chain, running a controlled emergency.
She spots us. Points.
"Two?" She is looking at me.
"Three."
She looks at Jane. Looks at me. Her expression shifts approximately two degrees in a direction I can't fully read. Then she turns and leads us through the dining room before I can clarify anything.
We follow.
She deposits us at a corner table—not the window seats Grace identified, but better. A quieter corner with good sightlines, making private conversation possible.
She hands out laminated menus without ceremony. "Welcome to Mane Street Bistro, where you can come hungry as a horse.” She winks at Grace. “Coffee?"
"Yes," all three of us say simultaneously.
The menus are single-page. Everything on them sounds like it was made from scratch before five this morning by someone who takes food seriously.
Grace reads hers with the focus of a woman completing a finals exam. "What's mountain hash?"
"I'm guessing potatoes," Jane says.
"With what?"
"Unclear. Possibly elk. Possibly standard ingredients, just branded with geographicalconfidence."
"I'm getting it."
"Obviously."
I watch Jane watch Grace and feel something loosen in my chest that has been wound tight for three weeks. This. This specific texture—the banter, the sideways attention, the way she pays attention to everyone around her without performing the attention. It was real on the island. It's real here. It was never the island.
The coffee arrives. Real coffee—dark roast, wide mugs, the kind of temperature that means it was brewed recently.
Jane wraps both hands around her mug. Closes her eyes for one second.
"Good?" I ask.
"Aggressively good." She opens her eyes. "Why is everything here so good?"
