“Only ones who interfere with my herbs and my dinner.”
“I didn’t interfere with dinner. I improved the wine.”
“Interference can be competent,” I say.
“That is true,” he says.
He considers me for a moment, and I can almost see him deciding which answer to give. Not whether to lie. That is not the feeling. More like he is choosing how much of the truth belongs at this table.
Then he says, “I work in hospitality.”
I give him a flat look. “That’s not an answer.”
“It’s an accurate answer.”
“I said earlier that accuracy and fairness are not mutually exclusive. I did not say accuracy gets to be useless.”
He laughs quietly. “Fair.”
“That sounded painful for you.”
“It was.”
“Good.”
He leans his forearms lightly on the table, and the movement brings him closer without making it feel deliberate. The linen of his shirt pulls slightly across his shoulders. His rolled sleeves show forearms strong enough to make me briefly forget the next thing I planned to say, which is not a thing I appreciate in myself.
“Sometimes I serve food,” he says.
“I had gathered that,” I say.
“Then why ask?”
“Because people are more interesting when they explain themselves.”
“No,” he says.
“People are more interesting when they reveal themselves by accident.”
The words settle between us, warm and quiet beneath the room’s noise.
I hold his gaze.
“That’s a dangerous thing to say to a woman with a notebook.”
He looks at the notebook, then back at me.
“I assumed.”
“You assume a lot.”
“I observe first,” he says. “Then I assume.”
“That is not better.”
“Maybe. But it’s certainly more accurate,” he replies.
I shake my head, but I’m smiling now. He sees it. The conversation moves after that, not in a straight line but in the way good conversations do when both people stop managing the outcome. We talk about food first because it is the safest dangerous thing on the table. He asks what I ate in Lyon. I tell him about Alain and the menu being taken away from me. He approves of Alain before he knows him. I tell him the quenelle was perfect, and he asks whether I mean perfect or merely comforting. I tell him I do not use perfect as a decorative object. He says good.
