“You were, love,” Colin said, in a voice that closed the subject as neatly as a latch clicking shut. “Stephen wasn’t. He sent you in to do his dirty work.”
Diwa’s shirt was sticking to the small of his back. He’d sweated clean through the cotton sometime between the mention ofreinforcement learningandsubpoena, and he was fairly sure that if he moved too quickly the damp patch would become visible and Stephen would take note of his nervous sweating. He would take it as a sign of sexual perversion and moral bankruptcy, no doubt. He kept very still and studied the paper tablecloth, where a ring of condensation from his water glass was bleeding into the red-and-white check.
Thankfully, the food arrived.
The waiter set Colin’s carbonara down first, then the arrabiata, then the margherita, and finally Diwa’s cacio e pepe, which came in a wide shallow bowl with a crack of black pepper across the top and a sheen of pecorino that caught the candlelight. Diwa had never been so grateful to see pasta in his life.
He picked up his fork, twirled a generous portion, and deposited it onto the side of Colin’s plate. The cacio e pepe sat in a small golden heap next to the carbonara.
Colin speared the offering, brought it to his mouth, and chewed. His eyebrows lifted. He didn’t say anything, which was, by Colin’s standards, a rave review.
Diwa dug into his own bowl, even though he’d filled up on bread twenty minutes ago and was now facing the consequences. The cacio e pepe was good, properly peppery, the cheese emulsified into a sauce that clung to each strand, and he ate it with commitment, because the alternative was sitting idle while Stephen’s gaze took another pass at him across the table.
“This is as good as anything you’d get in Rome, man.” Diwa pointed at the bowl with his fork, grateful for a conversational lane that didn’t involve his company’s litigation exposure. “Seriously. You ever been? Stephen?”
Stephen wound his fork through the arrabiata. “Contiki, when I was twenty. It was a coach tour, and there were forty of us on a bus. We had two hours at the Colosseum, then three hours at a bar near Termini where a lad from Coventry was sick into a fountain.” He chewed. “Ryland took me to Venice last year, though. That was different.”
“Yeah, Venice is incredible. The whole Dorsoduro area —”
“It was nice,” Stephen said, in a tone that did not invite further discussion.
Diwa nodded and ate another forkful, recalibrated, and pressed on. “You’ve got to live like the locals do, that’s the thing.The tourist restaurants near the main squares are all traps. They charge you eighteen euro for a plate of carbonara that tastes like it came out of a microwave. That’s actually why I keep a flat in Rome, over in Trastevere. Nothing flashy, just a pied-à-terre, but the neighbourhood’s proper residential. There’s a great little trattoria on the corner, wine shops where the guy knows me by name and remembers my past buys.” He twirled his fork through the cacio e pepe. “We should sort something out, actually. When Lysander’s back in the UK. The place has three bedrooms, so it’d be one for me and Colin, one for you and Ryland, and Lysander would have his own space. We could do a long weekend, eat our way through the whole city —”
His words petered out as he realised what he’d just done. He’d just told Colin’s eldest son, whom he’d met forty-five minutes ago, that he planned to share a bedroom with his father. In Rome. On a family holiday he’d unilaterally organised.
Stephen glared at him. “So you’d stay in a room with my dad, then?”
Diwa loaded his fork with the largest possible quantity of cacio e pepe and put it in his mouth, chewing with great and deliberate attention to the texture, because his mouth was now performing the only useful function left available to it.
“Well, yes,” Ryland said. He was cutting his margherita into precise eighths with a knife and fork. “That would be the logical arrangement. Couples share a room for proximity, convenience, and access for sexual relations. It’s the standard configuration.” He aligned a slice with the edge of his plate. “There’s data suggesting couples engage in intercourse thirty-five per cent more frequently on holiday than at home. Stephen and I exceeded that figure quite significantly ourselves in Venice.”
Stephen’s breadstick snapped in half, and for the rest of the dinner, he wouldn’t meet Diwa’s eyes.
Chapter Nineteen
Thebill came, and Stephen had his wallet out before the waiter had finished setting the card machine down on the paper tablecloth.
“Ryland and I will drive you home, Dad.”
It wasn’t a question. Stephen already had his coat off the back of his chair, threading his arms through the sleeves, while Ryland aligned his knife and fork on the plate.
Under the table, Colin’s hand came down onto Diwa’s thigh. He pressed down once, firm and brief, his thumb against the seam of Diwa’s jeans. Diwa’s leg went rigid under his palm.
They’d had plans. Nothing spoken aloud, because it hadn’t needed to be. But Colin was meant to go back with Diwa to Ledbury Road, with the evening unspooling from there in whatever direction it wanted to go.
“All right, love,” Colin said, to Stephen.
Diwa’s hand came down over his under the table, closing around Colin’s fingers for a count of two before letting go. Colin didn’t look at him. If he looked at him, Diwa would see hisdistress, and know what it cost him to sit here while his son picked apart the one thing he’d ever chosen for himself.
Diwa leaned in to kiss Colin’s cheek, careful and restrained. His mouth was warm and dry against Colin’s skin, and he lingered half a second longer than was strictly appropriate for a public goodbye. “Night, Colin.”
“Night, love. I’ll message you.”
The yellow warmth of the restaurant fell behind them as they stepped out onto the Broadway. The March air was cold and damp, carrying the flat mineral smell of wet tarmac and the distant bass thump from a pub two doors down. Stephen walked ahead with his hands in his coat pockets, shoulders hunched, and Ryland fell into step beside Colin with his car keys already out.
Ryland’s car was a sensible grey Volvo parked on the side street behind the restaurant. Ryland unlocked it with a press of his thumb against the key fob. Stephen pulled open the front passenger door, got in, and shut it behind him with far more force than required.
Colin got into the back seat, set his bag on the floor between his feet, and pulled the seatbelt across his chest.
