I looked at him over my shoulder while I checked the pot on the stove. “I had complete faith in you until that last sentence.”
“That seems unfair.”
“It is, but dinner is in forty minutes and fairness is not the governing principle of this kitchen.”
He moved past me with bowls balanced carefully in both hands. Two months earlier, he’d taken a bullet through the shoulder in front of eight hundred people and kept moving. Tonight he crossed my kitchen with more caution than he’d shown in the Orpheum.
The kitchen was running hot. Chicken braised with garlic and white wine had another twenty minutes. The rice was doneand covered. I’d already dressed the bitter greens. Bread waited beneath a folded cloth, and a tart was cooling on the sideboard where my father had no doubt already spotted it.
From the salon, Jules Guidry’s saxophone wound through the house in a low, easy line. Dominic sat at the piano, not leading so much as laying the floorboards under the melody. Jules had a way of entering a phrase from the side, as if he’d been standing around the corner listening to it for a while before deciding it was worth joining.
Thiago came back into the kitchen and set the second bowl where I pointed.
“Better?” he asked.
“Marginally.”
“I’ll take it.”
He leaned a hip against the counter and watched me stir the sauce. His hair was still damp at the temples from his walk over from the Marigny. He had not yet fully adjusted to the fact that New Orleans in October could still feel like someone had draped a hot, wet towel over the city and forgotten to remove it.
Wearing one of the shirts he bought on Magazine Street, Thiago looked less like a visiting bodyguard every day and more like a man who belonged in my line of sight.
“You’re staring,” he said.
I added another pinch of salt without looking up. “You are standing in the middle of my kitchen being decorative. It’s difficult to avoid.”
“The decorative criticism again.”
“Take it up with Dominic. He’s the one who keeps encouraging you.”
That made him smile. Dominic had heard one full report about Thiago’s new apartment in the Marigny and immediately announced that the neighborhood had good bones. Two days later he sent over numbers for a locksmith and a plumber.He also offered an unsolicited observation about where to get decent olives within walking distance.
Dominic instructed me to make sure Thiago took the extra key to the front door.
I lifted the lid on the braise. “Open the Burgundy.”
Thiago reached for the bottle. “Do you want me to pour tonight?”
“I want you to open. Celeste will insist that she do the pouring.”
He uncorked it cleanly and set the bottle down. “I talked to my mother this afternoon.”
“And?”
“She asked whether the city always sounds like this.” He tipped his head toward the salon. “I told her no. Then I told her yes.”
“That’s accurate. Yes, and no.”
“She laughed.”
I set the spoon down. “How serious are you about having her move here?”
“Serious enough to be looking,” he said. “Not tomorrow. But serious.”
“For near you or with you?”
“Near me, I think. Close enough that I can check in. Far enough that she can close the door and tell me to mind my business.”
