Chapter 27 - Lucy #2
"Three years and you show up with no reservation and a beautiful woman. Some things don't change." She looks at me. Smiles. "Come in. I'll find you a table."
Inside is small—twelve tables, maybe fifteen, the kind of restaurant that doesn't need a sign because the food does the advertising.
Candlelight. White tablecloths. The smell of garlic and wine and bread and something roasting that makes my stomach clench with sudden hunger.
It's half-full—couples, a family in the corner, a group of women laughing over pasta.
Normal people having normal dinners on a Friday night.
Marta seats us in the back corner. A booth—semi-private, angled so that Benedict can see the door.
I notice that. He chose this seat, or Marta chose it for him, because she knows he needs to see the door.
The operational awareness that never turns off, even here, even now, even on a date with a woman he put cologne on for.
We sit. He picks up the menu. Puts it down. Picks it up again. His hands are doing the thing they do when he's not in control—the restlessness, the fidgeting, the body's admission that the man who commands and dominates and moves through the world with lethal precision is, at this moment, nervous.
Benedict Ambrose is nervous.
"You're fidgeting," I say.
"I don't fidget."
"You've picked up that menu twice without reading it."
He sets the menu down. Flat on the table. Puts his hands in his lap like a schoolboy who's been caught. Then looks at me with an expression that is so stripped of performance, so entirely without the mask, that I feel my breath catch.
"I haven't done this in a very long time," he says.
"Done what?"
"Sat across from a woman in a restaurant. Eaten food. Made conversation that isn't strategy or seduction or the extraction of information." He pauses. "Normal things. I haven't done normal things in a very long time."
"What did you do with other women?"
"Took them home. Or took them to hotels.
Or didn't take them anywhere—found them and used them and forgot them.
I didn't sit with them. I didn't learn their coffee preferences.
I didn't—" He stops. Looks at the candle between us, the flame reflected in his eyes.
"I didn't want to know them. That's the difference.
I wanted their bodies and I didn't want the rest. With you I want the rest and it terrifies me because I don't know what to do with the rest."
The honesty of it. The raw, unperformed, almost painful honesty. This man, who operates in layers of deception—the Brotherhood, the investigation, the charm, the mask—sitting in a restaurant telling me that he doesn't know how to have dinner with a woman he cares about.
"You're doing it now," I say.
"Badly."
"You're here. You put on cologne. You brought me to a place that means something to you. That's not badly. That's brave."
He looks at me. The word brave landing the way it landed on the phone Thursday night, when I told him he was brave, and he said I didn't know that. He hears the word differently than most people—not as a compliment but as a claim. A statement about who he is that he isn't sure he can live up to.
"Marta was my mother's friend," he says.
"This was my mother's favorite restaurant.
She used to bring me here when I was small—just me, not Gabriel, not Josiah.
Just the two of us. She'd order the gnocchi and I'd have whatever she was having because I wanted to be like her and she'd laugh and tell me I was her favorite dining companion. "
Margaret Ambrose. Dead of a "sudden illness" when Benedict was—what? A teenager. The mother whose death preceded the father's, whose loss left a wound he's never mentioned except in the negative spaces, the silences around her name.
"She sounds wonderful," I say.
"She was the only person in that house who was real.
Poppy reminds me of her—the warmth, the way she makes the house feel like a home instead of an institution.
But my mother had an edge Poppy doesn't have.
She saw what the Brotherhood was. She saw what my father was building.
And she—" He stops. "She died before she could do anything about it. "
The sentence hangs between us. She died before she could do anything about it.
The careful phrasing. Not she died. She died before she could do anything.
As if her death was connected to whatever she saw, whatever she might have done.
As if dying was not the end of her story but the interruption of it.
I don't push. I hold the sentence and let it exist in the space between us, alongside the candle and the bread and the menu neither of us has read.
"My father died when I was twenty," I say.
He looks at me. The attention shifting—from his story to mine, from his dead parent to mine.