The meeting was in a restaurant in Tribeca that the Castellanos used for conversations that needed the texture of ordinary life around them. White tablecloths. Good lighting. The kind of place where the other diners were absorbed in their own evenings and nobody looked at anybody else's table. Isabella had been to restaurants like this before, on the other side of the arrangement, the side where you knew who owned the room and felt safer for knowing it.
She had dressed carefully. She always dressed carefully. The habit of presenting exactly what the occasion required had been so deeply established over four decades that it operated independently of internal state, which meant that she arrived at the restaurant looking like a woman in full possession of herself while the interior of her wa
