The Man Behind The Menu

"I Know Everything That Happens Here

# CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Friday without translation work felt strange.

I had cleared my schedule intentionally. The NGO project sat unfinished in a folder I had decided not to open. The new client in the Later folder was still waiting for a response I wasn't planning to give. The inbox had become something I checked less frequently and each time I did I felt the particular quality of a person shedding something they had carried for years without realising how heavy it was.

I made breakfast. Cleaned the apartment. Sat at my desk for an hour and read the same page of a book three times without absorbing any of it.

I was restless in a way that wasn't quite boredom and wasn't quite anything I could name. The hours stretched differently without work filling them. I had built my life around the architecture of translation assignments and without them I was discovering I didn't entirely know what to do with myself.

So I did small things. Walked to the market on Colvaine Street. Bought flowers I didn't need. Sat in Petit Noir for coffee I didn't finish. Walked back toward Rue Selvaine through the longer route because the morning was cold and clear and I wasn't in a hurry to get back to an empty apartment with nothing requiring my attention.

Around two o'clock I was on the stretch of road past the Aldric boulevard when I saw him.

A man. Mid thirties. Dark jacket. The kind of face that was ordinary enough that you wouldn't remember it except for the particular quality of his attention. He wasn't looking at the shops. Wasn't on his phone. His eyes were on the street in the specific unfocused way of someone whose actual attention was somewhere else entirely.

On me.

I kept walking. Same pace. Same direction. Didn't change anything that could be changed.

Filed it.

An hour later I was at the market picking up bread when I saw him again. Different location. Not looking at me this time. Just existing in the same space with that particular quality of someone who was trying not to be noticed and had miscalculated.

I bought the bread. Left. Walked home the long way.

Filed it twice.

Told myself it was nothing and almost believed it.

---

I arrived at Oswald's at five forty-five.

The pre-service setup was underway the way it always was. Hendricks doing his rounds. Sera near the kitchen pass with her notepad. The building preparing itself for the evening ahead.

I was heading to put my things away when I passed the open door.

I had walked this corridor before without paying attention to what was behind it. Tonight the door was open at an angle that showed the inside clearly and I looked in the way you looked at things when you weren't expecting to see anything.

He was at a desk.

The desk was covered in paperwork. Stacks of it. Invoices and documents and things I couldn't read from the doorway. His head was down, reading something, and the expression on his face was not the dining room version or the office version or any version I had seen before. Just a person sitting at a desk with too much paperwork and the particular weight of someone who carries things that don't show up in public.

He didn't look up.

I kept walking.

---

The service began at six and by six thirty the dining room was filling the way Friday nights filled. Purposeful. Celebratory. People who had been waiting for this particular evening all week and had arrived ready for it.

I worked the console. Managed the flow. Welcomed guests and directed the room the way I had learned to direct it over weeks of doing it until it had become its own kind of language.

And every time the kitchen door opened and he came through I registered it.

Not deliberately. Not consciously. Just a shift in the room's pressure that I felt before I saw it. The way the staff adjusted their posture slightly without realising they were doing it. The way the energy of a space changed when a particular person entered it.

I registered it and went back to what I was doing.

This happened three times in the first two hours of service.

The fourth time the kitchen door opened I was at the console reviewing the late reservation list when I heard footsteps that weren't Sera's and weren't Hendricks' and weren't any of the other staff whose rhythms I had learned without meaning to.

I kept looking at the list.

The footsteps stopped near me.

I looked up.

He was at the console. Not doing his read of the room. Not passing through. Just there, looking at something on the console surface that didn't require looking at, and the whole quality of it told me the thing at the console was not why he had come.

He didn't look at me immediately.

Then he did.

*"Which language came first?"*

I looked at him. The question arrived before I had arranged my face for it.

*"Arabic,"* I said. *"I was twelve."*

*"Why Arabic?"*

*"My mother enrolled me. She decided I needed it."*

*"Just like that?"*

*"Just like that."*

A beat where the dining room continued doing what dining rooms did and neither of us was paying attention to it.

*"Why are you asking?"*

*"Asking what?"*

*"Why I'm a translator. Why Arabic. You don't usually ask questions like that."*

He said nothing for a moment in the way he went quiet when he was deciding something.

*"Why are you still here Scarlett. You're a translator. This is not your world."*

I thought about it. The honest answer existed somewhere I wasn't ready to go. The real reason I had taken this job and kept showing up and let weeks turn into something that felt less like employment and more like a choice I was still in the middle of making.

*"It's a good restaurant,"* I said.

*"That's not an answer."*

*"No. It isn't."*

He looked at me for a moment longer than usual.

Then he turned and walked. Not toward the kitchen. Not deeper into the building.

Toward the door.

The front door.

I watched him pass me. Watched him push the door open. Watched the Morvaine night receive him and then the door swung closed and he was gone.

I stood at the console.

The dining room was full behind me. Sera moving between tables. The older waiter attending to a couple near the window. The ordinary machinery of a Friday service running exactly as it should.

And I was standing at the front door console of his restaurant watching the street outside where he had just disappeared and thinking one thing.

Where is he going.

It was his restaurant. His building. His service. Friday night, full house, and he had just walked out of it like he had somewhere more important to be. No coat. No goodbye to the floor. Nothing.

Just gone into Morvaine at nine o'clock on a Friday like it was the most ordinary thing.

I turned back to the reservation book.

Picked up the pen.

*"Table four are ready to be seated,"* Sera said behind me.

*"I'll go,"* I said.

And the evening continued.

---

The last table cleared at eleven fifteen.

I did the close down checks with Sera and said goodnight to Hendricks and put my coat on and walked out onto Veldmarch Street into the Friday cold.

I walked home.

And somewhere in the twenty minutes between Oswald's and Rue Selvaine everything I had been keeping in separate compartments during the service arrived at once.

The man near Aldric boulevard.

The same man at the market on Colvaine.

The conversation at the console. The question that had arrived before she was ready for it. The honest answer she hadn't given.

And him. Walking out of his own restaurant into the night with no explanation.

Where had he gone.

At the back of my mind something tried to draw a line between the two men I had seen today and the room on the third floor and what I had understood in that room in a language that nobody knew I understood.

I pushed it away.

I was tired. It was Friday night and I had been on my feet for five hours and I had been asked questions I didn't have answers to by a person who gave me his answers in fractions and I was not going to construct theories out of things that probably meant nothing.

It meant nothing.

The man in the dark jacket was a coincidence.

The translation meeting was something I had put away and I was keeping it put away.

I got home. Hung my coat. Made tea.

Sat on the couch with the quiet apartment around me and the Friday night city outside the window and everything I wasn't examining sitting exactly where I had left it.

Tomorrow would be clearer.

Tomorrow usually was.

---

*End of Chapter Seventeen*