Page 124 of Fate, Interrupted

Norah

The sound of it is sharper than I expect.

Not the punch itself—that lands with a kind of terrible efficiency that I don’t have a word for—but the sound of the man hitting the floor is almost deafening.

Then silence as the bar goes still for exactly one second. After a moment it resets as the patrons decide collectively what they just witnessed.

Nobody does anything about it.

The bartender moves first, pointing toward the door with the calm authority of someone who has made this calculation before and arrived at the same answer. The man on the floor blinks, reassembles himself in slow increments, and pushes upright with one hand on his jaw.

I sit very still in the booth.

I’m not frightened anymore. I’m watching Silas because I don’t want to miss whatever his face does in the next few seconds. What it does is almost nothing. He slides back into the booth with the easy calm of a man returning from a minor errand, picks up his burger, and looks at me with an expression that is waiting to see what I’m going to do with all of this.

I pick up my own burger.

“Well,” I say.

“Could’ve gone worse,” he says.

“That’s a low bar.”

“It usually is.”

I watched a man get knocked flat in a roadside bar, and my primary response is to finish my eighteen-dollar burger. Either I have excellent priorities or the last several weeks have recalibrated my baseline for what constitutes a notable evening.

Both, probably.

“You didn’t hesitate,” I say.

“No.”

“Is that always how it works?”

He looks at me. “What do you mean?”

“When it goes like that. When someone pushes. Is it always that fast?”

“Usually,” he says.

“And you always know it’s coming.”

“Almost always.”

I consider that, turning it over. “Wow. That’s quite extraordinary,” I say finally.

“That’s one way to describe it. That guy had it coming.”

I don’t deny that. The room relaxes around us now, the low hum of conversation returning, someone racking balls at the pool table with a sharp decisive click. The bartender is back behind the counter, the whole incident already receding into the evening’s background.

I reach across the table and cut a piece of his burger and slide it toward me.

“Hey,” he says.

“Research,” I say. “I need to know if mine is better.”

He watches me eat it with the expression of a man exercising considerable restraint.