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several inches taller than she was, his hair was buzzed down to his scalp, and he had very round black eyes. Beautiful eyes, really. His skin was shiny with sweat and inside the collar of his chef’s jacket at the base of his neck she saw a scar, a raised purple welt.
    “I’m sorry? Fiona’s making a big deal about
me
?” Adrienne said. “I don’t even know her. I’ve never met her.”
    “I know,” he said cheerfully. He helped himself to a steak, gave it a generous ladle of béarnaise, plopped a handful of golden fries right on top.
    Adrienne followed suit. There was salad, too, a gorgeous crisp-looking salad that had already been lightly dressed with something. Adrienne mounded her crowded plate withsalad, thinking about what Thatcher had said about the vegetables. Fiona picked them out before the sun was up.
    Fiona! Fiona, whom Adrienne could not pick out of a crowd of two, was making a
big deal
about her. Adrienne needed to question this Mario person further to find out what was being said. Fiona Kemp, the reclusive genius chef, had been making a big deal all week because Adrienne was a woman. What had Thatcher said? He’d never hired a woman for the job before. Adrienne poured herself a tall glass of water then sat down next to the waiter with the blond ponytail. Mario took his dinner back to the kitchen. Adrienne felt weak, like her legs were made of baby greens. Before she got here she had been nervous to meet Fiona; now she was afraid.
    No one was talking. The only sounds were knives and forks on plates, the occasional palm tapping the bottom of the ketchup bottle. Two waiters were studying the menus. The new guys. One pale and thin with a bushy head of loose curls and a weak chin, and one handsome dark-haired guy wearing two gold hoop earrings. The guy with the earrings was reading the menu so intently that he shot food off his plate when he cut his steak. Adrienne concentrated on eating carefully—one drop of ketchup on the diaphanous white blouse and . . . well, there was no time to go home and change and nothing at home to change into. Adrienne ate her steak, the béarnaise, the garlicky fries—did she even need to say it? It was steak frites from a rainy-day-in-Paris dream. The steak was perfectly seasoned, perfectly cooked, pink in the middle, juicy, tender. The salad was tossed in a lemony vinaigrette but it tasted so green, so young and fresh, that Adrienne began to worry. This person Fiona had a
way.
If the staff meal tasted this good then the woman was possessed, and Adrienne didn’t want a possessed woman on her case.
    The whole thing had been too easy, she saw now. She shouldn’t be here, she didn’t belong here, but she had been swept along by her own greed and by Thatcher, who had been described in a major food magazine as “charismatic, compelling . . . he could talk a teetotaler into a bottle ofChateau Lafite.” He had convinced her, somehow, to take this leap. Adrienne thought it was weird that she hadn’t even
met
Fiona, but she’d chalked it up to the fact that Fiona was a recluse. A culinary Greta Garbo, or J. D. Salinger. Were Thatcher and Fiona married, engaged, committed, together, dating—or, worst of all,
exes
? She had to ask Caren. Caren who was three seats down eating a plate of only salad. Drinking, yes, espresso. Caren had advised Adrienne to keep a toothbrush and toothpaste at the restaurant. Caren knew everything.
    There was soft female laughter, as jarring to Adrienne as a tray of stemware crashing to the floor. She looked around to see Duncan and the bar back engaged in quiet conversation. They looked so familiar, so at ease—the girl grabbed Duncan’s forearm when she talked. Adrienne wondered if something was going on between them. The girl was young—in college still, Adrienne guessed—she had curly light brown hair and big brown eyes. Big boobs, too, and her oxford was unbuttoned one too far.
    Adrienne was one to talk.
Diaphanous top . . . gutsy