“Yes.” He held the door open. End of discussion.
The restaurant was called Maison Fontenelle, which should've told me everything about what kind of place it was. Old building, high ceilings, white tablecloths. One of those places where the menus didn't have prices, which meant either it was very expensive or they assumed you weren't paying. Either way, not a breakfast spot. Lunch, maybe, if lunch happened at eleven on a Monday and the maître d' greeted you by name and led you to a corner table that faced the room.
It faced the room.
I sat down and understood.
He wanted to be seen. More specifically, he wantedmeto be seen. Sitting across from him. In last night's dress with my hair pinned up and his cologne still in the fabric. The whole town could read that.
The whole town, by the look of things, was here.
Not literally. But enough of it. Mrs. Tureaud at a table near the window. Two men I recognized from the fundraiser. A woman from the congregation who'd squeezed my hands at the fish fry and said things I was still trying to understand.
Every single one of them looked. Some looked away quickly. Some didn't bother.
Judah opened the menu.
“You did this on purpose,” I said.
“Did what?”
“This.” I gestured, very slightly, at the room. At us. At the theater of it.
He didn't look up. “Order something. You haven't eaten.”
“Judah.”
He looked up then. Those pale eyes, completely steady. “The whole town already thinks what it thinks, Mercy. I'm just confirming it.”
Something hot moved through me that wasn't entirely anger. “You could've asked.”
“You're here.” He went back to the menu. “That's your answer.”
He was right, which was the most infuriating thing about him. I was here. In the dress. Having let him drive me to a white-tablecloth restaurant on a Monday morning like it was the most natural thing in the world. I'd made my choices. They'd just somehow all ended up pointing in the same direction without me noticing until I was already seated.
I picked up the menu.
He ordered for me. I let him, which I told myself was because I didn't know the menu and not because something about the way he spoke to the waiter — quiet, certain, no performance in it — made my stomach do a slow, traitorous roll.
The food came. We ate. He asked me, at one point, what I thought of the city budget process for the food bank grant cycle, which was such a deliberately normal question I almost laughed.
“You're doing it again,” I said.
“Doing what.”
“The thing where you act like last night didn't happen.”
He cut his food. Precise. “Last night happened.”
“Then why are we talking about grant cycles.”
“Because,” he said, without looking up, “we also have to be able to do this.”
I watched him. “This.”
“Sit across from each other and have a conversation that doesn't end in one of us saying something they can't take back.”He set his fork down and looked at me. “I'm trying to give us that.”
A part of me doubted that.
