Chapter 5 #2
"You look like you're calculating an exit strategy," he says, when I sit.
"I'm calculating what everything on this menu costs. This is exactly the kind of expensive I asked us to avoid."
"Don't." He opens his menu without looking at it. "Order what you want, and let's enjoy getting to know each other outside the office."
"That's easy to say when?—"
"Summer."
Just one word. He says my name like it's punctuation. Final and calm and not a point for discussion.
I look at the menu and order the duck, because it's what I want, and because I've decided tonight that I'm done being careful.
I will not let my past shade every future. I need to give Ezra a chance, and stop assuming all men are like my ex.
The sommelier appears. Ezra says something in what sounds like passable French, and a bottle arrives that I don't recognize.
When it comes, the sommelier handles it with the reverence reserved for things that have been waiting a long time to be opened.
"You speak French?" I ask.
"Enough to order wine and ask for directions." He pours, and the golden color of it in the candlelight is the kind of thing I'm going to be thinking about later, whether I want to or not. "Which means I speak it badly."
The conversation moves the way our best conversations do. Sideways through things that matter, without either of us announcing that we're doing it.
His foundation's work in Newark. My last piece on regulatory capture that ran two years ago and that he's apparently read three times. I share the specific problem journalists have with sources who want to be found but won't say so directly.
"You let them lead you on that article," he says. "You don't pull."
"You've thought about interviewing technique."
"I've thought about you." He says it without performance, the way he says things he's decided to say. "About how you work. The patience of it. I'm impressed."
I keep my expression neutral, with some effort.
The food arrives and it's extraordinary, which I was expecting, and I eat it without apology, which I think surprises him slightly.
"You expected me to order the cheapest thing," I say.
"I expected you to make a point about it."
"I made my point at the Honeyed Spoon." I cut into the duck. "Williamsburg was the ideological statement. This is just dinner."
He almost smiles. "Yes. Just dinner."
When the bill comes, he takes it without discussion. No performative reach-for-wallet that men do when they want credit for the gesture.
He simply takes it, signs it, puts it away. The number I briefly glimpse is one I will not be sharing with Kenzie, because she will never let me eat a normal meal again.
"Thank you," I say. "For dinner."
"Thank you for coming." He refolds his napkin with the precision that means he's about to say something considered. "And for staying, at the board meeting. I know what it costs to sit still while someone questions your credibility."
I look at him across the table. A man who has now, twice in one day, done something on my behalf without being asked and without making it about himself.
"I know what it costs to cower in front of manipulators," I say. "Flinching is a cheap payoff for them. Staying still is the work."
He looks at me for a long moment. "Yes," he says simply. "Exactly that."
We walk out into the October night.
His car, the black town car, Joel at the wheel, waits at the curb. He opens the door without asking.
"I can take the subway," I say.
"You can." He holds the door. "Or you can take forty minutes of not standing on a platform in the cold."
I get in.
He gets in after me. I watch the city slide past the tinted windows, and I don't examine what it means that I stopped arguing about it three sentences ago.
I have to admit this is much nicer than the subway.
I'm back in Brooklyn two hours later.
My apartment greets me with its usual ambivalence. The radiator clanks. I can hear the neighbor's music through the thin walls.
Of course, there's a stack of unopened mail on the counter.
I drop onto my couch and reach for my phone. Kenzie.
Tell me everything.
Board meeting, dinner, car home. It's fine.
Three dots. Summer.
I know.
It is not fine.
It's complicated.
That's what fine means when it's not fine.
I put my phone face down and tip my head back against the cushion.
His jacket is still on the desk chair. I can see it from the couch.
The cedar and linen is in the fabric, and the fabric is in my apartment, and the apartment is supposed to be the place where I'm a person rather than a journalist.
This is where I'm accountable to nothing except the water-stained ceiling and the radiator and the stack of unopened mail.
So I smell the jacket before I pull out my phone and open my notes.
Baythorne Tech — mentioned at gala. Referenced in Vale's orbit. Ezra's calendar includes site visit. Cross-reference: who benefits from acquisition? Who loses?
Below it, the note I added yesterday outside the Honeyed Spoon. He knows what I'm looking for. He's decided the risk of me finding it is worth whatever this is.
Figure out why.
I stare at both notes for a long time.
Then my phone buzzes with a text from an unknown number. The preview stops me cold.
You're asking the wrong questions about Baythorne. —A friend.
I sit up.
I open the message, but that's all there is. No attachment. No follow-up.
Just those eleven words and a number my phone doesn't recognize. I call it back immediately, and it goes straight to a generic voicemail with no name.
I put the phone down on the cushion. Pick it back up.
The wrong questions.
Which means there are right ones. Which means there's something about Baythorne I've been circling without knowing I'm circling it.
I screenshot the message. Forward it to my personal archive. Label it Baythorne — tip 1.
Then I open a new note and start writing down everything I know about Baythorne Tech. Which isn't enough yet, but is more than it was this morning.
The radiator clanks. The neighbor's music shifts to something slower. His jacket is on my chair.
I keep writing.