“Hi,” Beckett said, standing up slightly and giving me a nervous smile. Our table was a small, circular booth, covered in soft, cracked brown leather. I slid in next to him and he sat down too. I just looked at him for a moment, trying to understand this. “I wasn’t sure if you’d be here.”

“You weren’t sure that I’d be here?”

“Well, Kat thought you’d gone back to Stanwich,” he said with a shrug. As though this was a normal conversation to be having. Like he always passed along messages from Kat and surprised me in five-star restaurants.

“Kat?” I echoed. Now that she wasn’t the person waiting for me at the table, the absence of her was hitting me all over again. It suddenly seemed crazy to think that she would have been here—she’d obviously gone to the play like she’d planned.

“Hi.” A smiling, redheaded waiter had appeared in front of us. Like all the waitstaff, he was wearing a denim shirt and black pants, but whereas some of the servers just seemed like maybe they happened to wear this in off the street, something about him suggested this was more like a uniform, a costume he wasn’t quite comfortable with just yet. “I’m Todd, and I’ll be your waiter tonight. I’ve just finished my training, but I want you to know you’ll be in very good hands. There’s no question I can’t answer.”

I turned to Todd. The vengeance that had brought me down to the Village was suddenly coming back full force. “What’s the most expensive nonalcoholic drink you have?”

Todd opened his mouth, then closed it again, and blinked at me. “I—don’t think I can answer that question,” he said, deflating a little. “Let me just… check on that for you.” He hurried away.

“What?” Beckett asked, staring at me, a smile starting to play around the corner of his mouth.

“Don’t worry about it,” I said, waving it off. Though it now occurred to me that if there were two of us, we might be able to do more damage. Lobster and steaks and truffles on everything. I didn’t exactly like lobster, I wasn’t exactly sure what truffles were, and when we’d been together, Beckett had been going through a vegetarian phase, but who cared? I could give it all to Todd or something. “What do you mean, Kat said?”

“I ran into her,” Beckett said, playing with his silverware, turning the knife and fork over, then crossing them. It was funny, the details about someone you used to know so well that could then get fuzzy and fade away. I’d forgotten, until this moment, how there was some small part of him that always had to be in motion. “On Fifty-First.”