“I know.” She smiled up at me, and there was something in her expression. Something soft, and knowing that made my chest tighten. “But I’ll be there. We’ll do it together. It’s going to be fine.”
It was not going to be fine.
Nothing about this was going to be fine.
The restaurant was called Le Bernardin, because of course it was. My parents only ate at restaurants that required reservations made weeks in advance and had wine lists longer than most novels. It was the kind of place where the waiters wore white gloves and the napkins were folded into swans, and everything on the menu was described with at least four adjectives. It was also the kind of place where Athena’s dress, beautiful as it was, stood out like a wildflower in a field of perfectly manicured roses.
My mother noticed immediately.
“Julien,” she said, rising from the table with the kind of graceful precision that suggested years of cotillion training. “You’re late.”
“Traffic,” I replied, which was a lie. We were three minutes late because Athena had insisted on stopping to help a woman whose grocery bag had broken on the sidewalk.
“And this is...” My mother’s eyes swept over Athena with the clinical assessment of someone evaluating a potential threat to the family’s social standing.
“Athena,” I said. “My...” I looked at my mother, then my wife, then back at my mother and groaned.Here goes nothing. “My wife.”
My mother blinked.
Not once, but several times.
My father looked like he was having a stroke.
I knew the feeling well.
And my wife... well, she....
“Please call me Athena!” Athena shook my mother’s hand with genuine warmth. “It’s so wonderful to meet you! Julien has told me nothing about you, but I can already feel your energy... it’s very strong, very grounded, very—”
“Yes,” my mother interrupted smoothly. “How nice.”
My father stood, offering his hand with the kind of firm handshake that suggested he was already calculating Athena’s net worth and family connections.
“Athena,” he said.
He didn’t sound welcoming.
He sounded like he was welcoming a hostile takeover.
We sat.
The waiter appeared immediately, as if summoned by the sheer force of my family’s collective discomfort.
“Would you care for wine?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said.
“The 2015 Château Margaux,” my father said, not looking at the wine list.
“Actually,” Athena said brightly, “do you have anything organic? Or biodynamic? I try to be mindful of what I’m putting into my body, and the energy of the grapes really does make a difference.”
My mother’s eyes twitched.
Just once.
But I saw it.
“The Château Margaux will be fine,” my father said firmly.
