The waitress is young, effervescent, and efficient. Some instinctual part of me takes over when she asks if we’d like to start with some wine, and I don’t even need to look over the rest of the wine menu when I see Joseph Carr, and I order us a bottle—she likes J-name red wines, I think. She eyes me as I order for us, apprehensive and reticent. The wine comes, and we’ve exchanged a half dozen words. I order us a charcuterie appetizer, and her eyes light up. She loves cheese. She dips the crumbly white goat cheese in the fresh honey which comes complete with bits of honeycomb, and there’s fancy little white almonds dusted with salt and parmesan and oil, and pitted olives, candied walnuts, thin slices of pastrami and other fancy meats with names I can’t pronounce, all piled in artsy coils.

The wine loosens our tongues, and the charcuterie helps. It’s the kind of conversation that flows naturally, easily, but if you’d asked me five minutes later what we were talking about, I wouldn’t have known. Just…talking.

Then our server returns for our dinner order, and Nadia is still perusing the menu, but somehow I know what she wants. Maybe it’s the wine, maybe it’s nerves. Lisa used to love it when I ordered for us—took the pressure off, she said. I think she just liked being surprised, liked knowing I knew her well enough to get her what she would want.

“I’ll have the flank steak, medium, with truffle fries and the veggies of the day,” I hear myself say. “She’ll have the chicken parmesan, with a house salad, ranch dressing.”

Her mouth flaps, open, closed, open. “Um. Can I have a side of the truffle fries with the chicken parm?” I think she added it just to go against me ordering for her.

When the server is gone, notepad tucked into her black half-apron, Nadia leans forward. “Why did you order for me? How did you know I like chicken parm?”

“I—” I swallow. I have no clue how to answer.

“Is that coincidence too?” She scratches at the table with a fingernail, following the deep, aged grooves of the grain. “Sometimes it seems like you just know things about me, Nathan. It’s weird.”

“I’m sorry,” I say. “I overstepped.”

“It’s just…I love chicken parmesan.” She laughs, a light tinkle. “Like, weirdly love. You don’t even know how many times I’ve tried to make it for myself, and it’s never quite right. If I get one thing right, another is off.”

Almost verbatim from the book.

“A good guess,” I say, but my voice is weak, low, rough.

“How do you guess that someone likes chicken parm?”

“You like cheese, and it’s the cheesiest thing on the menu.” True.