The Man Behind The Menu

Before Bree Called

# CHAPTER TWO

I have a theory about mornings.

They are either on your side or they aren't, and you know which one it is before your feet hit the floor. The light comes in a certain way, or the silence has a particular quality, or something in your body just settles into the day before the day has even properly started — and you think, *yes, this one is mine.*

This was not one of those mornings.

I knew it the moment my alarm went off and I reached for my phone and knocked my glass of water off the nightstand instead. I lay there for a moment, staring at the ceiling while water soaked slowly into the rug I had spent three weeks choosing, and made the executive decision that today was going to require considerably more coffee than usual.

The apartment looked the way it always looked on a Wednesday morning — which is to say, mostly acceptable. I was a neat person by nature. My mother had raised me in a house where things had places and places had things, and somewhere along the way that had become less of a habit and more of a personality. My shelves were organized. My kitchen surfaces were clear. My shoes were lined up by the door with a consistency that a therapist would probably have something to say about.

The *mostly* part was the throw blanket I had abandoned on the couch four days ago and had been carefully ignoring ever since. And the two mugs on the coffee table. And the stack of reference documents I had told myself I would file last Sunday and had instead walked past approximately nineteen times.

When I got lazy, I got *committed* to it. There was no half measure. The apartment would be immaculate for two weeks and then I would decide that the dishes could wait one more day, and then somehow it was Thursday and I was eating takeout on the floor because the table had become a filing system.

I made coffee, pulled my hair back, and sat at my desk by the window with the grey Morvaine morning spread out in front of me.

This was my favourite part of the day, genuinely. Before anything was required of me. Before my phone started. Just the city and the coffee and the particular silence of an apartment that belonged entirely to me. I had grown up in a house full of noise and people and competing needs, and I had moved to Morvaine at twenty-three specifically for this — for mornings where the only sounds were the ones I chose.

I opened my laptop.

Three emails. One from Harmon confirming a document I had submitted yesterday had been approved by the client. One from a colleague asking if I wanted to join a group lunch on Friday — I mentally filed that under *probably not but I'll say maybe to avoid the conversation.* And one from a new client, a referral through the firm, requesting a consultation for a contract interpretation project.

I read the brief twice.

The client's name was Deveraux. No first name given. French company, expanding into Russian markets, needed a native-level Russian interpreter for a series of internal communications and one formal negotiation meeting. Standard enough on the surface. The brief was thorough, which I appreciated — nothing worse than a client who wanted precision work and couldn't be bothered to provide precise instructions.

I replied, confirmed my availability, and suggested a video call for Thursday morning.

By nine fifteen I was dressed and out the door.

---

I worked from three locations depending on the nature of the assignment. For document work — translations, contract interpretations, written communications — I worked from home or from the shared workspace on Miravel Lane that the firm subsidized for its freelancers. For client-facing work, consultations, live interpretation, I went to them. Wherever them happened to be. Hotels, offices, private residences occasionally, boardrooms more often than not.

Today was a boardroom.

Sector Financial Group occupied the fourteenth and fifteenth floors of a building on the eastern edge of the Aldric District, and they had been a Harmon & Voss client for two years. I had worked with them four times. I knew the receptionist's name — Petra, mid forties, kept a small cactus on her desk and seemed deeply suspicious of everyone who came through the door regardless of how many times she had seen them before.

She looked at my ID like she had never seen it in her life.

"Zia Scarlet," I said. "Interpretation services. I have a nine thirty with the Meridian team."

Petra considered this. Looked at her screen. Looked at me. Looked at her screen again.

"I'll need to call up," she said.

"You do that," I said pleasantly.

I waited. Straightened my jacket. Looked out at the grey morning pressing itself against the floor to ceiling windows. Morvaine in October was beautiful in the way that cold things sometimes were — all silver light and bare branches and the sense that the city was gathering itself for something.

The call went through. Petra handed me a visitor badge with the energy of someone doing me an enormous personal favour, and I thanked her warmly because I was a professional and because it cost me nothing and because Petra's suspicion was not personal, it was simply constitutional, and I had long since made peace with that.

The Meridian team was on the fifteenth floor.

There were five of them — three from the Morvaine office, two who had flown in from their Moscow partners. The Moscow contingent spoke excellent English but had requested a Russian interpreter for the detailed financial discussions, which was the correct decision. There was a significant difference between *conversational* fluency and *boardroom* fluency, the kind where a misplaced preposition could alter the meaning of a clause in a contract worth several million euros.

I was there for the clauses.

The meeting ran from nine thirty to twelve forty-five and was, by any reasonable measure, fine. The Moscow partners were professional and prepared. The Morvaine side was professional and prepared. The documents were thorough, the discussion was structured, and for the first two hours everything moved with the smooth efficiency of people who had done this before and intended to continue doing it.

Then the difficult client arrived.

His name was not on the original attendee list, which was the first thing. He came in at eleven twenty, twenty minutes after a short break, and settled himself at the head of the table with the particular ease of a man who considered all tables to be his table by default. Sector's managing director — a measured, careful man named Albrecht who I had worked with before and respected — introduced him as a senior stakeholder.

His name was Gregor Fasik.

He was Austrian. He had the particular brand of confidence that came not from competence but from the long experience of never having been told no in a professional setting, which was a different thing entirely and considerably more dangerous. He looked at me once when I was introduced, decided I was not interesting, and looked away.

I had met Gregor Fasiks before. Different names, same architecture.

The problem started at eleven forty.

The discussion had moved to a specific clause in the partnership agreement regarding profit distribution across territories. The Moscow partners had a question about the precise language used — a reasonable question, actually, the clause was ambiguous in a way that would matter enormously in practice. I was mid interpretation when Fasik interrupted.

"That's not what it says," he said, in German, which he had apparently decided we were doing now.

I paused. Looked at him.

"The clause states," he continued, still in German, with the measured authority of a man who expected the room to reorganize itself around his point, "that distribution is calculated quarterly, not annually. Your interpretation is incorrect."

I looked at the document in front of me. Read the relevant clause again, which I had already read twice before the meeting began, which I had already interpreted correctly.

"The clause states," I said, in German, clearly and without particular emphasis, "that the *review* cycle is quarterly. The distribution itself is calculated on an annual basis. Those are two different things."

Fasik looked at me. The particular look of a man recalibrating, deciding whether to push.

He pushed.

"I think you'll find—"

"I've found," I said. Pleasantly. "The language is precise. I'm happy to walk through it word by word if that would be helpful."

There was a brief silence. The kind that has texture.

Albrecht cleared his throat. One of the Moscow partners looked between us with the careful neutrality of someone who had attended enough international meetings to know when to watch and when to intervene.

Fasik picked up his pen. Said nothing further on the matter.

The meeting concluded at twelve forty-five. Albrecht thanked me on the way out with the slightly relieved warmth of a man who had watched something almost become a situation and was grateful it hadn't. The Moscow partners shook my hand and one of them — the younger one, Dmitri, who had been quietly sharp throughout — said in Russian, without breaking stride, that my interpretation had been excellent.

I thanked him in Russian.

Fasik left without speaking to me, which was fine. Better than fine, actually.

I collected my things, returned my visitor badge to Petra — who received it like evidence — and walked out into the grey Morvaine afternoon.

---

The shared workspace on Miravel Lane smelled like coffee and other people's deadlines.

I liked it well enough. It was useful — good wifi, private booths for calls, a kitchen with an espresso machine that was genuinely excellent for a shared space. I went there most afternoons when I had document work to do and didn't want to do it from home, which was most afternoons when my apartment had entered one of its lazy phases and the pile of unread reference materials on my coffee table had started to feel like an accusation.

I took a corner booth, opened my laptop, and worked.

The Deveraux client had responded — they could do Thursday at ten. I confirmed it. I finished the secondary review of a legal document I had translated last week and submitted it. I started preliminary reading on a new assignment — a series of communications between a Morvaine-based NGO and their Arabic-speaking partners in three different countries — and made notes in the margin of my printed brief with the green pen I used for Arabic work specifically, because I had a colour system, because of course I did.

At some point someone put a coffee on the edge of my table. I looked up.

It was Priya from accounting — not my accounting, the accounting firm that shared the workspace two days a week. We had been making occasional conversation for about six months in the way of people who occupy the same space regularly without ever quite making plans.

"You looked like you needed it," she said, nodding at the coffee.

"I always need it," I said. "Thank you."

She went back to her own booth. I drank the coffee. Outside the window Morvaine was doing what it did in the late afternoon — the light going amber, the streets shifting from purposeful to leisurely, the city changing registers the way it did every evening like it was settling into a different version of itself.

I worked until six.

---

My apartment smelled like the candle I had left burning that morning, which I absolutely should not have done and which had not, thankfully, resulted in anything catastrophic — just a slightly dramatic pool of wax and the warm amber scent of something called *Autumn Library* that I had bought on a whim from a market stall three weeks ago and which had turned out to be the best impulse purchase I had made all year.

I dropped my bag. Took off my shoes. Stood in the middle of my living room for a moment in the specific way that I stood in the middle of my living room at the end of long days — just existing in the space, letting the day fall off me like a coat.

The two mugs were still on the coffee table.

The throw blanket was still on the couch.

The stack of documents I had been ignoring was still being ignored.

I looked at all of it and made a private agreement with myself that I would deal with it this weekend, which was the same agreement I had made last weekend, but the intention was genuine and I felt that counted for something.

I changed into something that could most charitably be described as comfortable and sat on the couch and looked at my phone.

The question of dinner had arrived, as it always did, with the particular passive aggression of something I had been meaning to think about since four o'clock and had successfully avoided until now. I opened my fridge. Considered it. Closed my fridge.

There was food in there. Technically. There were the components of several reasonable meals if I was willing to be a person who assembled things at seven in the evening, which I was not.

I was not.

I opened my phone. Pulled up the delivery app. Scrolled through it with the focused attention I had been giving it consistently for the past three years, which had resulted in a working shortlist of approximately six places in Morvaine that I trusted to feed me adequately without requiring me to put on real clothes or engage in meaningful decision-making.

Lebanese. I was in a Lebanese mood. The place on Colvert Street did a lamb dish that was the specific kind of comfort food that asked nothing of you and gave a great deal in return.

I ordered. Estimated wait time: thirty-five minutes.

I put on something in the background — a documentary about deep sea creatures that I had already watched twice and found unreasonably soothing — and stretched out on the couch under the abandoned throw blanket and stared at the ceiling with the particular blankness of a person whose brain was technically still processing the day but had agreed to do it quietly.

Fasik. *I think you'll find—*

I really did not like men who said *I think you'll find.*

It was never actually about finding anything. It was about the particular pleasure some people took in being the one doing the correcting, regardless of whether the correction was warranted. Fasik hadn't cared about the clause. He had cared about being the person in the room who knew something the rest of us didn't.

He hadn't known something the rest of us didn't.

I had let it go the moment I walked out of that building, which was what I did with Fasiks. You corrected the record, professionally and without drama, and then you put them down and walked away from them like the irrelevance they were.

Still. Annoying.

The documentary moved on to something about bioluminescent creatures in the deep ocean — things that made their own light in the dark, which I found, genuinely, one of the more remarkable facts about the world. I watched a jellyfish pulse slowly through black water, trailing something that looked almost like fire.

My phone buzzed.

Not the delivery notification. A message from Bree.

*Are you alive or are you deep in a document somewhere*

I smiled slightly.

*Alive*, I typed back. *Barely. Difficult client today.*

*Ugh. The kind that argues or the kind that just sits there being wrong?*

*The kind that argues.*

*Worse*, she sent back immediately. *At least the silent ones let you finish your sentence.*

I laughed. Put the phone down. Picked it up again.

*How was your day*, I sent.

*Fine fine. Actually I wanted to ask you something. Not urgent. Can we do coffee this week?*

*Thursday morning I have a consultation at ten but I'm free after. One o'clock?*

*Perfect. The place on Rue Calvaine?*

*Obviously*, I sent, because it was always the place on Rue Calvaine, had been for two years, and Bree asking was more formality than question.

The delivery notification arrived. I buzzed the driver up, collected the bag from the door, and ate on the couch with the lamb dish balanced on my knees and the jellyfish still pulsing on the screen in front of me.

It was, by any reasonable measure, a perfectly ordinary Wednesday.

I did not think about the restaurant on Veldmarch Street.

I did not think about the man who had come through the door in the wall.

I ate my food and watched creatures that made their own light in the dark, and when I finally went to bed at eleven, I slept easily and well, the way you do when your life is settled and yours and you have no particular reason to expect otherwise.

---

*End of Chapter Two*