The table went quiet.
“In the restaurant,” Stephen said. “And just now, when we came in. He doesn’t. He waits. He always waits for Daddy to go to him. I’ve been watching, and he hasn’t slipped up once.” Stephen’s pleating had reached the corner of the napkin. He folded it back the other way. “Most alphas are grabby. They just take. They put their arm round you or have their hand on your back, and they don’t think about it because they’ve never had to think about it. He does.”
Diwa had gone very still beside him.
“There,” Stephen said, to his wine glass. “Moving on.”
“I’m recording that verbatim,” Ryland said, his pen moving, and scratching along for quite a while. “That was substantially more detailed than a standard appreciation response. I’m marking it as an outlier.”
Colin’s eyes were bright over the rim of his wine glass, and he didn’t say a word.
They made it through three more rounds.
Ryland’s questions had a logic to them that Colin suspected came from the same place as his meal planners and his sourdough pH research; a genuine belief that if you got the inputs right, the outputs would follow. Question three asked each person to name a skill they wished they had. Ryland wanted to whistle with two fingers. Stephen said he wished he could cook, which earned him a look from Colin that could have peeled wallpaper, because the boy had grown up watching Colin make a roast every Sunday and had retained absolutely nothing beyond the ability to open a tin. Diwa said he wished he could fix things, and then caught himself, glancing sideways at Colin with his mouth half-open and his ears going pink.
“What is your happiest memory from childhood?” Ryland read from the page, his pen poised.
“Easy.” Diwa leaned back. “My grandmother’s house in Antipolo. We’d go every summer, all the cousins, and she’d cook for three days straight. There was this one dish,kare-kare, that took her an entire afternoon. She’d send us out to buy the peanuts from the market and then make us shell them on the kitchen floor.”
Ryland wrote. His pen moved to Stephen.
“Birthday Nandos.” He said it to the table. “Every birthday, Dad took us to the Nandos on the A13. He saved up for it. We got a whole chicken between us and extra corn on the cob, and Dad let us have Cokes, which he almost never did because of ourteeth.” He fiddled with his napkin. “It took him ages to save up the money, but every year he managed. Sander and I still look forward to it now.” Stephen said.
Colin reached for Stephen’s knee under the table and squeezed once.
Ryland’s pen had stopped moving. He stared at what he’d written, blinked twice, and drew a small asterisk beside the entry.
They moved on. Question six asked about comfort foods, which devolved into a three-way disagreement about whether cheese on toast constituted cooking (Colin: yes; Stephen: barely; Diwa: absolutely not, there’s no thermal transformation of the protein matrix, at which point Stephen told him to shut up, but without any real heat behind it). Question eight asked what they’d change about the world if they could, and Ryland answered first with “standardised international plug sockets,” delivered with such conviction that even Stephen couldn’t find a retort.
The lamb was down to bone and scraps by the time Ryland squared his final page against the table edge.
“Closing question.” He tapped his pen against his papers to emphasise this. “Updated ratings. Same one-to-ten scale. I’ll begin.” He set the pen tip against the page. “Ten.”
Colin looked at him. Ryland’s posture was as rigid as it had been at the start of the evening, his pen aligned precisely beside his plate, but his eyes had lost the careful blankness they usually carried in social settings.
“Ten,” Colin said.
“Still a ten,” Diwa said, with the exact same brightness he’d deployed two hours ago, as though the intervening rounds of emotional excavation had not touched him at all. His neck, however, was blotchy from the collar up.
Ryland’s pen moved to Stephen’s name. All three of them looked at him.
Stephen drained the last of his Malbec, set the glass down with a click, and folded his arms.
“Five.”
Ryland recorded it without comment, capped his pen, and squared the pages into a neat stack.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
TheCrispy Pata arrived at half six in a foil tray the size of a hubcap, delivered by a man on a moped who handed it over with the gravity of someone transferring state secrets. Diwa tipped him twenty quid, carried it through to the kitchen, and set it on the island beside the rice cooker, which had been doing its job for the past forty minutes and was now emitting the sweet, starchy exhale that meant the jasmine rice was ready.
He’d ordered it from a place in Earl’s Court that his Tita Cora had discovered on her last visit and declared acceptable. The pork knuckle was golden and blistered, the skin pulled tight as a drum, crackling audibly when Diwa shifted the tray. Beside it, he’d laid out the dipping sauces in small ceramic bowls: soy with calamansi, spiced vinegar, and the chilli garlic paste that Colin had graduated from avoiding entirely to spooning directly into his soy sauce as though he’d been eating it his whole life.
Colin was due at seven. He’d texted from the bus forty minutes ago.Leaving Pimlico. Mrs Gregory’s bathroom tooklonger than expected. Don’t start without me. That was Colin’s way of saying he was hungry and would be annoyed if Diwa had eaten the good bits by the time he got there.
Diwa had not eaten the good bits. He had, however, pulled a piece of crackling off the edge of the knuckle, because he was only human, and the sound it had made when it snapped between his fingers had been too much to resist. He’d eaten it standing at the counter with his eyes closed.
The rest of the spread was already out. Garlic rice in a huge blue bowl. Achara, bright and sharp, the pickled green papaya catching the kitchen light. A dish of sliced tomatoes and salted egg that was missing its bagoong, because Colin had tried the shrimp paste once, held it in his mouth for three seconds with an expression of frank betrayal, and spat it into a napkin with a finality that closed the subject forever. Bagoong remained the single hill his omega would die on.
