The restaurant was in the West Village.
Small. Candlelit. The kind of place that had been on the same corner for thirty years and hadn't changed anything because nothing needed changing — red checkered tablecloths, low ceilings, the smell of garlic and red wine and something baking. The kind of place that had nothing to prove.
Aria stood outside it at six fifty-eight in the cold and looked at it through the window and felt the particular strangeness of arriving somewhere as herself. Not Ethan's assistant. Not Gerald Bennett's daughter on a mission. Not a performance of innocence or competence or harmlessness.
Just Aria.
She wasn't entirely sure she remembered how that worked.
She went in.
He was already there.
No suit jacket — she'd never seen him without one outside the office at n
