“I’ll get that.”
“I’ve got it.”
He lifted her bag, slung his own over his shoulder, and closed the trunk. They started toward her building. The sidewalk was warm and crowded, a summer Sunday that made Brooklyn feel like its own country.
Halfway up the block, a woman came out of a brownstone doorway in pearls she had no occasion for and a navy coat she didn’t need in June. She saw Gabriel before he saw her, and her whole face arranged itself into the small, sharp pleasure of a society woman with new information to deploy.
“Gabriel, is that you?”
“Mrs. Whitcomb.” He moved his bags into one hand and offered the other. “How are you?”
“Good, thank you. I was dropping off a casserole for a parishioner who lost her husband last week. Now I’m on my way to tea at Eleanor’s.” Her eyes drifted to his bags. “And what brings you here? This is not your usual haunt.”
“Tessa lives here.” Gabriel turned. “This is Tessa Thorne. Tessa, this is Genevieve Whitcomb. Old friend of my mother’s.”
“It’s a pleasure,” Tessa said, putting her hand out without hesitation. She held the woman’s gaze.
“Thorne. Are you one of the Connecticut Thornes?”
“South Jersey, actually. My grandmother’s people.”
“Oh.” The woman repositioned. “And what’s it you do, dear.”
“I run a catering company in Brooklyn. We did Eleanor’s anniversary in May, and Devney Wilder’s wedding.”
“Did you, now?” The smile got a degree warmer, because the names had landed. “I think Eleanor was talking about you only this morning. That young woman who did the champagne tower. Yes.”
“That was me.”
“Well.” She turned her gaze fully on Tessa now, taking inventory of the dark hair, the easy posture, the hand still held out a beat longer than it needed to be. Tessa didn’t retract it. Mrs. Whitcomb shook it again.
“Nice to meet you, Miss Thorne. Gabriel, do tell your mother I asked after her. We’ve been due for lunch for months.”
“I’ll tell her.”
She moved on toward the corner.
Tessa watched her go.
“That was efficient,” she said.
“What was?”
“She decided I was worth a handshake in about thirty seconds.”
“She thawed the second you said the champagne tower.”
“That’s how it works.”
“Only in certain rooms.”
He looked at her then and she wasn’t rattled. She had handled the woman the way she handled clients, which was the way she handled everything: by knowing what she could do and not pretending otherwise.
“You’re going to be fine in those rooms,” he said.
“I know.”
A man was sitting on the corner outside the bodega, his back against the brick. He looked up as they passed. Then he looked again, and his face changed, and he stood.
