Page 13 of Deadly Confessions
"What's good today?"
A fraction of hesitation, so brief I'd miss it if I weren't watching closely. She considers the question as if it's real, which it is. Most servers deflect it. "The branzino. The kitchen got the delivery this morning. If you're not in a hurry, the genovese is worth the wait."
"I'm not in a hurry."
"Then the genovese."
She writes it down. I watch her write it.
"You were reading Camilleri," I say. "In the church."
Her pen stills for half a second. She looks up. This time there's something in her expression I wasn't expecting: amusement, faint and dry, the kind that comes from someone who finds a situation absurd but isn't going to say so. "You have a good memory."
"Occupational requirement."
She considers that. "What occupation?"
I look at her steadily. "Property."
The amusement in her face doesn't change. If anything it settles in slightly, as if that answer confirmed something she already knew. She writes a note I can't read from this angle, tears the page from the pad. "I'll put that in."
She moves toward the kitchen.
I pour a little more wine into my glass and think about what just happened, which is that a waitress in a restaurant I've eaten at thirty times gave me a look that said she knew exactly what I was and found it faintly funny, and then went to place my order.
I've sat across from bankers who sweat when I enter a room. Lawyers who can barely hold their pens. Men who have done genuinely terrible things going pale at the mention of my family name.
This woman went to check on the branzino.
The birthday party in the back is getting louder. One of the women at the bar has pulled out her phone. The light coming through the front windows is flat and bright, the kind of Saturday light that bleaches everything a little, makes the city look more ordinary than it usually does.
She comes back out of the kitchen with a basket of bread she sets on the table without comment. I'm aware of thespecific way she moves through the room, which is efficiently, without waste, threading between tables and chairs the way people do when they've been doing it long enough to stop thinking about it. But there's something in it. The slight pause at certain tables, reading a situation in one second, adjusting the approach. She's good at her job in the way that requires paying attention.
"The Genovese takes about twenty minutes," she says. "Can I bring you anything while you wait?"
"Sit down," I say.
She looks at me.
"I'm serious."
"I'm working."
"Your tables are fine. You have five minutes." I push the chair across from me out from the table with my foot. "I'd like to know your name."
The composure doesn't crack. She looks at the chair, then at me, then at the room with the brief efficiency of someone calculating something. She sits down. Not in the manner of someone who's been charmed into it. In the manner of someone who's decided it's acceptable.
"Valentina," she says.
"Niccolo."
"I know."
I'm quiet for a moment. She holds eye contact without effort. Most people can't do that, not with me, not for long. She does it like it's ordinary.
"You knew in the church," I say.
"Yes."
