A pause. “He’s offering to come to you.” Imani sat back in her chair. Through the kitchen window, the south side street was doing its morning routine.
A bus heaving past, two kids in school uniforms cutting through the corner store’s parking lot.
The usual argument between the guy on the second floor and his upstairs neighbor about the subwoofer.
The sounds of a world that had nothing to do with Callaway Briggs or engagement parties or champagne colored dresses.
“Why?” She said. “He’ll explain that, too, when he sees you.” She thought about it.
She thought about the plate and the lab because she’d been thinking about the lab since yesterday afternoon, wondering if he’d had the food tested, wondering if anything had come of it.
She thought about Celestine’s voice through the wall. “Fire her.” “Make sure she doesn’t get work in this city again.”
She gave DeMarco her address and hung up. He arrived at 10:30, no driver, just himself, in a plain black car that was clearly expensive but had been chosen to look as unexceptional as possible.
He buzzed from the lobby. The elevator was not working. When he reached the third floor, his expression registered the hallway briefly and then settled back into neutral.
He was taller in person than she’d expected, though she wasn’t sure what she’d expected.
He wore a gray long-sleeve shirt and dark pants, no suit today, which felt deliberate.
His beard was neatly trimmed. The sharpness she’d noticed in his eyes at the party was still there, but it had a different quality here, in the dim hallway light, less composed, more direct.
“Thank you for seeing me,” he said. “I haven’t decided anything yet,” she told him.
“Come in.” She’d straightened the apartment, which she wasn’t happy with herself about. It was still clearly the apartment of someone who was managing rather than thriving, the patched couch, the second-hand table, the mismatched kitchen chairs, but it was clean and the windows were open and the morning light did what it could with what it had to work with.
She made coffee because her mother had raised her to make coffee for guests and some things were too deep to override.
She set two cups on the table and sat across from him. He wrapped both hands around the mug and didn’t drink.
“The food was tested,” he said. She nodded slowly. “Zolpidem.” “High concentration.” He said it flatly, the way people say things they’ve had time to process and have chosen to present without effect.
“I watched the security footage. I saw what you saw.” The kitchen was quiet except for the distant thrum of the bus route.
“I’m sorry,” Imani said. And she meant it, not for what she’d done but for what he was sitting with.
