Ask For Me
1425 Words
# CHAPTER FOUR
I made the decision on Friday morning.
Not dramatically. Not after a sleepless night of weighing things or a moment of sudden clarity. I simply woke up, made coffee, sat at my desk by the window, and the decision was already there waiting — quiet and settled, like it had arrived sometime in the night and made itself comfortable without asking permission.
I texted Bree.
*Tell your friend I'm interested.*
She replied in four minutes, which for Bree was essentially instant.
*I'll let her know. Her name is Nancy.*
And then, thirty seconds later:
*Good.*
Just that. No exclamation. No *I knew you would* or *you won't regret it.* Just good. Which was Bree saying everything she needed to say in the most efficient way she knew how.
I put my phone down and went back to my coffee and didn't think about it any further than that. I had decided. The decision had been made. There was nothing to examine about it anymore.
Nancy contacted me herself that afternoon. A short message, professional in tone, asking if I was available Sunday at two o'clock. The restaurant would be closed. She preferred to conduct these things before service.
I confirmed.
I spent Saturday doing what I always did on Saturdays — document work in the morning, a walk through the market on Colvaine Street in the afternoon where I bought vegetables I would probably not cook and a paperback I would definitely read. I cleaned the apartment properly for the first time in ten days, which felt less like productivity and more like the thing I did when something was coming and I wanted my space to feel ordered before it arrived.
The mugs were finally in the cupboard.
The documents were finally filed.
I went to bed at a reasonable hour and slept without the ceiling staring.
---
Oswald's on a Sunday afternoon was a different place entirely.
The amber glow was still there behind the windows but muted, the restaurant breathing differently without the weight of a full evening's service. I stood on Veldmarch Street for a moment before I went in — not hesitating, just observing. The stone facade. The name beside the door. The particular stillness of a space that knew exactly what it was.
I pressed the buzzer.
The door was opened by a young man in a white shirt who said nothing, just stepped back to let me in and gestured toward the interior with the economy of someone who had been told to expect me and nothing else. I followed him through the main dining room — empty now, chairs still up on some of the tables, the candlelight replaced by something more practical and less forgiving — and through a door at the back that opened into a narrow corridor.
He knocked once on a door at the end of it.
"She's here," he said, to whoever was on the other side.
Then he left me there.
The door opened.
---
Nancy was not what I had expected, which I noted immediately and without judgment. I had built a vague impression from Bree's description — *a friend from the restaurant* — and whatever impression that was, it wasn't this.
She was perhaps thirty, perhaps a little older, the kind of face that didn't give its age away easily. She wore dark clothing, minimal, the kind that looked effortless because the person wearing it had long stopped thinking about effort. Her hair was pulled back. She looked at me when I walked in the way that certain people looked at things — fully, without performance, taking in what she needed to take in and discarding what she didn't.
She did not smile.
She didn't not smile either.
She simply gestured toward the chair across from her desk and sat back down in her own.
"Zia Scarlet," she said. Not a question.
"Yes."
"Bree speaks well of you."
"That's kind of her."
Nancy looked at me for a moment. Then she opened the folder on her desk — an actual physical folder, which I found notable — and glanced at what was inside.
"You're a translator," she said.
"Freelance. Yes."
"Arabic, Russian, Mandarin."
"Among others."
She looked up at that. Not impressed exactly. More like she was revising something.
"The position is front of house," she said. "Hostess. Evenings Tuesday through Saturday. Sunday and Monday closed." She turned a page. "The role requires discretion, composure, and the ability to manage a room without appearing to manage it. Our guests expect a certain standard of service."
"I understand."
"Do you have experience in hospitality?"
"Not formally. I have three years of client-facing work in a professional services environment. I'm comfortable managing people and expectations simultaneously."
Nancy considered this. Said nothing.
"The previous hostess," I said, "left suddenly, I understand."
Something moved very briefly across Nancy's face. Not discomfort. More like a door closing quietly in a room you had almost walked into.
"She did," Nancy said.
She offered nothing further. I did not push.
We continued. She asked precise questions and I gave precise answers and she wrote nothing down, which told me she was either not interested or she was the kind of person who remembered things without needing to record them. I suspected the latter. Nancy had the quality of someone who collected information the way other people collected objects — carefully, selectively, and with a clear sense of what she intended to do with it.
She was also, I noticed, very good at silence. She let it sit between questions without filling it, which most people could not do comfortably. It was a useful quality in an interviewer. It was the kind of silence that made nervous people talk more than they meant to.
I was not a nervous person.
I let the silences sit with her.
At some point during this quiet back and forth — I couldn't have said exactly when — something changed in the building.
It was the same thing I had felt in the dining room four days ago. That shift in pressure. That degree of temperature that registered in the body before the mind caught up with it.
Somewhere beyond the door of this office, in the part of the building I hadn't been shown, something was happening. Footsteps, perhaps, or a door. A voice — low, even, carrying without effort through walls that were apparently not as thick as they looked. Not words I could make out. Just the quality of it. The particular tone of someone speaking in a space that responded to them.
Nancy's eyes didn't move from mine.
But something in her posture adjusted. Barely. The way you adjusted when you became aware of something without wanting to show that you had.
The presence passed. The building settled.
I looked at Nancy.
She looked at me.
"Any questions?" she said.
"The hours," I said. "You said evenings. What time does service typically end?"
"Eleven. Occasionally later for private bookings."
"And those are—"
"Infrequent," she said. Which was not exactly an answer.
I noted that too.
"When would you need me to start?" I asked.
"Tuesday," she said. "This week."
Four days. I ran through my schedule briefly in my mind — Tuesday evening was clear. Wednesday. The week was manageable.
"That works," I said.
Nancy closed the folder.
"Then we'll see you Tuesday," she said. "Six o'clock. Ask for me when you arrive."
She stood. I stood. She extended her hand across the desk and I shook it and her grip was exactly what I would have predicted — firm, brief, entirely without warmth and entirely without hostility. Simply transactional. She had assessed what she needed to assess and reached whatever conclusion she had reached and that was the end of it.
The young man in the white shirt appeared again, as if summoned by something I hadn't heard, and walked me back through the corridor and through the empty dining room and to the front door.
I stepped out onto Veldmarch Street.
The October air was cold and clean and Morvaine spread out around me in its usual unhurried way. I stood for a moment, adjusting my coat, not thinking about the shift I had felt in the building or the voice through the wall or the way Nancy's posture had changed by a single almost imperceptible degree.
I was thinking about Tuesday.
Six o'clock. Ask for Nancy.
The door behind me closed.
I walked home.
---
*End of Chapter Four*
- Writer
