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“Sure you did.” Darius reached out and straightened Norden’s already-straight collar, purely to see whether he’d allow it, and looked delighted when he did. “You’ve had an expression for three days. The one where you’re pretending to read a report and actually just staring at nothing. I’ve seen it exactly once before, and that time you’d been poisoned.”

“I wasn’t poisoned tonight.”

“Debatable. Symptoms look similar.” The elevator doors opened, and Darius held up a hand before Norden could step through, too satisfied with himself. “Move the table. Wherever you’re going, move it before she gets there. Get the light right. You’ll thank me.”

Norden didn’t dignify that with a response, mostly because he’d already decided to do that, and stepped into the elevator alone, Darius’s laugh following him all the way down.

He called it a project discussion, which was technically true. The project would, in fact, come up. That was where the truth stopped: a private room at a restaurant with a three-month waitlist that had never hosted an actual business meeting, a table set for two with the formality of a place that understood what it was being used for tonight even if one of the two people arriving didn’t yet.

He’d arrived twenty minutes early and moved the table himself, over the waiter’s mild objection, six inches closer to the window. He wanted the courtyard behind her when she sat. He wanted to watch her against that light. He’d also sent back the first candle arrangement, too tall, blocking the sightline he’d already requested once, and stood over the replacement himself until it sat where he wanted it, close enough to warm the air between the two place settings without becoming a distraction.

He knew what he was doing, every step of it, down to the six inches he’d moved the table. He’d decided the transparency was a cost worth paying.

She arrived seven minutes late, dressed like she’d changed twice and settled on the version of herself least likely to admit she’d changed at all. She stopped three steps into the room and took the whole space apart with her eyes in seconds — the light, the table, the wall of glass onto a courtyard lit to look accidental.

“If this is a business meeting, you’re majorly overdoing it. I’ve had job interviews with less production value.”

“I know.” He was already at her chair before she’d finished the sentence, pulling it out, one hand at the back of it like the matter was settled and had been settled for a while. She looked at the gesture like it might be a trap. She sat anyway, coat still on, taking one more look around the room before she let herself settle into it fully.

“Should I be worried?”

“Extremely. I’m already regretting the candles.”

She found the first problem before the bread arrived.

“Your lighting’s wrong.” She said it with no interest in softening it for the room’s benefit, delivered the way she’d deliver a diagnosis nobody wanted but everybody needed to hear regardless. “Not wrong exactly. Controlled. Which is the same thing, dressed up in a nicer jacket.”

“The room was designed for atmosphere.”

“The room was designed to make people feel expensive, which is a different skill than making them feel good, and restaurants love to pretend it isn’t.” She glanced at the fixture overhead, already running the math. “Warmer at the edges, colder toward the kitchen. Somebody wanted the wall art to read better than the food does. Priorities.”

He’d eaten in this room eleven times. He’d never noticed the lighting shift toward the kitchen. He noticed it now and couldn’t stop noticing it for the rest of the meal, a small permanent adjustment to how he’d see every room in this building from now on.

The wine came. She tasted it and set the glass down, already revising an opinion downward, the exact face she’d make at a piece of glass that had cracked out of pure spite.

“You didn’t pick this.”

“I did.”

“You picked the vintage the sommelier suggested. Not the same thing.” She turned the glass by the stem, addressing it directly like it might defend itself. “This isn’t your fault. You’re a perfectly nice bottle of wine. You’re just not his.”

“How would you know what my opinions taste like, exactly.”

“I wouldn’t. That’s the problem. You ordered the safe answer instead of the true one.” She set the glass down, already moving on to the next flaw the room had to offer. “It’s a pattern.”

He caught the sommelier’s eye across the room with one raised finger, no words required, and had the second bottle — the one he wanted — on the table inside two minutes. She tasted it, went still, and looked at him like she was recalculating a sum.

“There he is.”

“There I am. Try not to sound so surprised about it next time.”

He held her gaze a second too long over the rim of his own glass, letting her see how much he’d enjoyed proving her right, and she looked away first, which he counted as its own small victory.

By the second course, she’d found fault with the kitchen entrance too — a swinging door hung, in her professional opinion, by an architect who’d never worked a service line in his life — and he found himself leaning across the table to hear the rest of it, against his better judgment.

“You could fix the door.”

“Nobody’s asked me to fix the door.” She stabbed the air toward it with her fork. “Wrong swing radius. Whoever’s carrying plates through there loses several seconds a trip they don’t need to lose. Multiply that by a full dinner service and you’ve lost an hour of somebody’s life to a door.”