“Not freshness,” I say.
Her brows lift. “No?”
“Freshness is the minimum. If I am checking whether a fish is fresh, I have already chosen the wrong supplier.”
Baptiste mutters, “He says this like a man who has never insulted me before breakfast.”
Serena’s eyes stay on the turbot.
“Then what are you looking for?”
“Condition,” I say.
“Handling. Stress. How the flesh answers pressure. Whether the eyes are clear because the fish is good or because someone knows how to make a tired fish look briefly alive.”
She leans closer, not touching until she looks at me for permission. I nod. She presses gently near the spine, exactly where I did.
Baptiste watches her and says, “Careful. He’ll marry you if you do that correctly.”
Serena doesn’t look up.
“That seems like an extreme consequence for checking turbot.”
I say, “He exaggerates because his fish can’t speak for him.”
Baptiste says, “My fish speaks beautifully. You’re the one who refuses to listen politely.”
Serena finally smiles, and the sight of it at 5:30 AM in a market built from ice, noise, and labor does something I do not intend to examine.
She asks, “This one?”
“Yes,” I say.
“Why not the second?”
“The second is good.”
“That’s not an answer.”
I look at her. “The first is better.”
She narrows her eyes at the fish, then nods slowly.
“The second has a softer belly.”
“Barely.”
“But enough,” she says.
“Yes,” I say. “Enough.”
She writes that down. We move through the hall faster after that.
Langoustines, sole, sea bass, clams. She asks clean questions. Never for performance. Never to show me she has done reading. She asks because she wants the answer and dislikes vague ones as much as I do.
By the time we reach the produce pavilion, the sky outside the high windows has started to pale. The air changes from salt and ice to earth, wet leaves, crushed herbs, citrus oil, and coffee. Serena stops near a stall of early tomatoes and inhales before she touches anything.
“You smell before you look,” I say.
