Chapter 16 #2
“Which one,” I ask, rinsing parsley, letting the cold water bite my wrists.
She grins. “The queen mother.”
“Correct,” I say, then add, “She prefers outcomes to parades,” because I know Siobhan collects the lines I drop and keeps them like charms.
Siobhan rolls a carrot under her palm and sets the knife down long enough to look at me fully. “Outcome of her visit,” she says, voice light, “or do I need to sharpen another knife.”
“We traded pleasantries,” I say. “She warned me about sharks. I told her I have a pot and a stove.”
“She would be delicious braised,” Siobhan says, almost sweetly, and the joke lands in that strange space where laughter feels like the wrong temperature. She picks up the knife again and resumes the rhythm, chop, chop, chop, relentless, clean.
“Late nights for a while,” I say, pivoting. “We increase the buddy system on close. No one to cars alone, we walk each other, we share rides or we sleep in the office. There are too many stories in the papers.”
She snorts softly. “Stories keep papers alive. Bodies keep police busy. We, on the other hand, have a menu.”
I dry my hands and lean my hip against the prep table. “I am serious. You do not brush off rumors because they do not smell like your grandmother’s kitchen. There are patterns, and I do not intend to be one.”
She tips her chin, a half salute. “Yes, Chef.”
“Pepper spray stays in your pocket, not your tote. The back alley gets the new bulb today, and the night watch logs arrivals and departures.” I look at her. “You do not argue with me on this.”
She draws the blade through a carrot and smiles, all teeth. “Some men hate it when women have kitchens of their own,” she says, like a proverb, like a dare. “They make a mess they expect us to clean.”
“Some men can choke,” I answer, too fast, and she laughs again, a sound that sits bright on the surface and does not travel down.
“Who walks you?” she asks, the knife still moving. “The queen mother?”
“Funny,” I say. “I will be fine.”
Her eyes click to mine and hold. “That is not an answer.”
“I have one,” I say, which is the closest I can get to telling the truth without opening a door I will not be able to close. “We are careful. We always were.”
Something in her face softens, or shifts, and I cannot tell which. “Always,” she agrees, and returns to the carrots with renewed, almost cheerful vigor.
We move through the morning with that choreography kitchens learn and keep—a reach, a pass, a small nod when the pan is too hot or the timing is off.
The scones come out glossy and proud, crackling as they cool, and the smell loosens something in the room even the espresso could not.
I break one in half and give Siobhan a piece, steam curling up like a blessing.
She bites, closes her eyes, hums. “Perfect.”
“Almost,” I say. “Next batch gets a pinch more salt.”
“Of course it does,” she says, smiling for real this time, and for a few minutes I get to pretend we are still twenty and invincible and the only knives we held were for work.
Lunch service runs like a clean river, no logjams, no surprised trout.
The vendor tasting is fine, the investors nod in that careful, bored way money nods when it wishes to be seen acting interested, and a family from the neighborhood sends back a plate only because they want to compliment it and do not know how else to get my attention.
I make a circuit of the tables, I cut another scone for an elderly woman who reminds me of my grandmother, I answer a question about the butter with the words cultured and patience, and I think, this is what I bargained for, this is the part I can live in.
The sky darkens early and sulks by five.
Staff peel away in pairs per the new protocol, coats zipped, jokes thrown over shoulders to make the distance to the parking lot feel shorter.
Siobhan is last with me, wiping down the pass, stacking metal, the radio playing something sentimental we pretend not to like.
We run through the checklist twice, more for my nerves than necessity, and I send her out with a small box of scones and a warning I deliver like a mother and a general.
“Text when you are home,” I say.
“I always do,” she replies, and tilts her head toward the dark glass. “Watch your back, Chef.”
“I have eyes,” I say. “Go.”
When her footsteps fade I am alone with the humming fridges and the soft tick of hot metal cooling.
I walk the dining room one last time, hands smoothing over chair backs, fingers finding a crumb and flicking it to my palm.
I lock the till in the safe, count to sixty because that is what a nervous habit looks like when it puts on a lab coat, and kill the lights except for the small string of fairy bulbs over the front window that make the frost look like lace.
At the back door I pull on my coat and shoulder my bag.
The lock turns with a satisfying bite. I step outside into the sharp night and the smell of snow that has not committed yet.
The alley is a tunnel of cold. My breath smokes.
I reach to pull the door tight and my finger finds something that should not be there.
Tucked into the doorframe is a small object, darkened by weather, wedged just enough to be deliberate. I ease it free. It is a silver button, heavier than it looks, the tiny harp worn smooth with age, a thin braid around the rim. I feel the cold of it in my palm like a message pressed into skin.
I turn it in the light from my phone and my stomach drops, not fast, more like an elevator that shudders and keeps going.
The buttons on Moira’s coat were twins to this one.
I saw them this morning. I counted them without meaning to, two undone, three fastened.
I tell myself there are a hundred coats like that in this city, a thousand buttons with harps, a million ways for a piece of silver to go missing.
The problem is that this is tucked, not dropped. It is placed, not lost.
My fingers close around it and I look up at the dark lane and the quiet road beyond, listening to the kind of silence that feels curated. The air smells faintly of orange peel, or maybe that is only my memory trying to make order out of a cold night.
I lock the door again and slide the button into my pocket.
It settles there like a coin on a scale.
Then I walk to the car without hurrying, keys between my fingers because habit is a kind of prayer, and I do not look back until I am in the driver’s seat with the doors locked, engine humming, heat turning the cold into fog.
Only then do I reach into my pocket and touch the button again.
I am almost sure it fell from Moira’s coat. Almost.