He looked at Ethan with the pleasant curiosity of a man who had already decided what he was looking at. How long have you been working with Natalie's properties? The phrasing was precise. Working with Natalie's properties, not for Oralene, not even for her. It placed Ethan one tier below contractor.
I don't work for her, Ethan said. Grant's smile did not waver. Of course. He turned back to Natalie and began asking her something about a reszoning variance in Jackson Square, and the moment slid past smooth and apparently harmless. Natalie watched Ethan's face while Grant spoke.
He was not embarrassed. He was not angry. He was simply present in the particular way he was always present, fully aware of what had just happened and unmoved by it. Later, in the elevator going down, she asked him how he was. Fine, he said.
Grant was I know what he was doing, Ethan said. It doesn't bother me. He paused. What bothers me is that it bothered you. She looked at him.
You've been watching me since he walked over, he said, checking to see if I was rattled. I don't need you to manage that. I wasn't managing. You were, he said, not unkindly. I know what I walked into tonight.
I'm not going to fall apart because some guy in a $2,000 suit tried to remind me what I do for a living. She said nothing. I do good work, he said. I know I do good work. That's enough.
The elevator opened. He held the door. She thought walking out into the night air that she could not remember the last time someone had told her to stop worrying about them and actually meant it. She learned his rhythm slowly and he learned hers. And somewhere in that process, the precise nature of what they were doing became harder to categorize.
He took her to a dim sum place in the Chinatown on a Saturday morning, a cashonly room with laminate tables and a line that started before 9. She wore jeans and a coat she had bought specifically for occasions when she did not want to be recognized. And she ate pork buns standing at a counter and did not check her phone for two hours, which was, she realized afterward, the longest she had gone without checking it on a weekend in roughly 4 years. He showed her the workshop. It was smaller than she had imagined a converted garage space in an industrial block south of downtown with two lifts, pegboards hung with tools organized by size, and a white board covered in job schedules written in different colors.