“The prince of organic and authentic food doesn’t even look at what he’s eating and drinking?”

“Touché,” he says, cheersing beers with me. “In the original French, of course, for you, Manon des Sources.”

Soon enough, we’re on our second beers, talking about his little hometown on the east side of the island, with its underfed volcanic spring and its lone, out-of-place Japanese restaurant, and about New York, adopted land of delicious sushi. A new course arrives—chestnut and onion fritters—in steaming-hot trays. I eat, singeing my fingertips, and we never stop talking. When I mention that I grew up by Delirium Forest, I expect him to pause, to flinch. To think of an unhappy spot with tree roots poking up out of the mossy ground like dinosaur bones, littered with the cigarette-butt and used-up sneaker remains of campers and visitors with macabre intentions. But he just nods and calmly reaches across me for the container of ginger powder.

I glimpse his feathered tattoo on his forearm again and blurt out: “I like your tattoo.”

“Thanks,” he says, sprinkling ginger on his last fritter.

“What does it represent?”

He catches my eye. “I guess I can tell you. I’ve definitely given you enough flack today.”

“A lifetime of flack in one meal,” I confirm.

His head ducks toward his fritter, mid-smile. “It’s not that interesting. It’s pretty cliché. It represents someone I’ve lost. Someone I want to carry with me.”

He avoids my eyes, almost shyly, and takes a bite. A shiver runs down my spine. It’s no secret I chase darkness in others to try to find kinship for the darkness in myself.

“That is kind of cliché,” I say. And even though he laughs good-naturedly, I regret making light of it immediately. “It’s beautiful, though. Seriously. Very, uh, finely etched.”

“Tell that to my uncle. He’s waging an ongoing battle to get me to remove it. The lengths I’ve gone to to normalize it are ridiculous. He loves history, so when I first got it, I even came up with this bullshit story explaining it was based on a Viloki legend, since I didn’t want to explain the truth. That just pissed him off even more—to be defacing myself and dishonoring a piece of Viloki culture at the same time.”

“Why don’t you want to tell him the truth?”

He raises an eyebrow. “Seriously? My uncle?”

I smirk. “Well, I like the idea of a tattoo based on Viloki legend. Which legend did you pick?”

He sets down his fork. “Did you hear a lot of them growing up?”