Philip pulled the four-pronged blade from the meat grinder. In his hand, it looked like a throwing star. “He thought his presence would help publicize the place,” he said, carting the grinders’ parts to the sink. “He’d invested behind the scenes. I guess he thought it would give him cachet. De Niro co-owns restaurants, so Nate wanted to get in on the action. And, unfortunately, I couldn’t afford to fund Banque’s refresh and all Coffre’s start-up costs myself.”

There was a bitterness in Philip’s tone that Tonya hadn’t heard before. “It was a great addition,” she said, hoping to lighten the conversation.

Philip continued cleaning. “Yeah. But such is life, right? There are no guarantees. Sometimes you open up a restaurant to rave reviews and a pandemic forces its closure. There’s nothing to be done. You can’t take out the money you put in already. It’s gone.” Philip shut off the faucet and reached for a towel. “Nate could stomach the loss, though. The man had millions in the bank. And his partners weren’t poor.”

The reminder of Nate’s wealth worked like a match, rekindling all the hate Tonya had for him. The man had possessed money, fame, and power, and he’d abused it all, using his cash and cachet to make the problems that he’d created go away.

And she’d let him do it.

Tonya put away the mop and went for the other cleaning supplies. Karma had ultimately come for Nate Walker, she told herself. Though he might not have paid as much as she’d felt owed, life had turned out fair. He’d definitely paid in the end.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

IMANI

Imani didn’t want to see it. She sat in her office, laptop balanced atop her thighs, staring at the cursor hovering above a link promising to take her to Nate’s dead body. Once she clicked, there’d be no going back. No unseeing the exploded brains of a man with whom she’d shared food and drink while chatting about politics, parenting, and myriad other subjects. No forgetting that every individual—even those in possession of unique intelligence, beauty, or strength—was just another animal, an assemblage of muscle, sinew, and fats laced together by an electrical system. A machine that could be instantaneously reduced to parts.

Still, there was a reason why people had open-casket funerals. Without seeing a body, it was easy to treat any death like a dream, to convince the part of oneself responsible for action that none was needed. The dead disappeared from view and could be assumed to be off doing whatever they did when alive and out of sight. There was no need to mourn. No need to fight.