Just an observation, he left. Daniel picked the knife back up. His hands were steady. His mind was not. She sounded like a person.
He knew exactly what Marcus meant by that. Because he had seen it himself. The moments where the CEO facade had a hairline crack in it and something human showed through. He had seen it the first time she walked through his kitchen 3 years ago and genuinely listened to his explanation. He had seen it in the way she talked to new employees.
Direct but never demeaning correcting mistakes without making people feel small. He had seen it at the staff Christmas party 2 years ago when the catering company had gotten the order wrong. And instead of making it someone's problem, Victoria had quietly gone into the kitchen with the line cooks and helped fix it without drawing attention to herself. He had seen it. He had also spent 3 years carefully filing those observations in a mental drawer labeled none of your business and keeping that drawer firmly shut.
The problem was that last night, standing in the rain at 10:43, Victoria Hayes had walked up to that drawer and opened it herself. And now Daniel couldn't get it closed again. He worked straight through dinner service, running on the specific adrenaline of a busy kitchen that doesn't leave room for personal crisis. And when the last table cleared, and the kitchen was shutting down at 9:50, he was one of the last two people out the door, the way he always was. He was zipping his coat in the hallway when his phone buzzed.
A text. Unknown number. No, not unknown. A number he'd seen on staff communications but had never seen text him directly. It said, "I hope you got home safely last night.
I should have said more or less. I'm not entirely sure which." V. Daniel stared at it for so long that Jerome the dishwasher walked past him and said, "You good, Mr. Brooks?"
And Daniel said, "Yeah, without looking up," which probably wasn't convincing. He typed three different responses and deleted all of them. Then he typed, "Amara was still up when I got home. She had approximately 45 questions." He stared at that, sent it before he could reconsider.
3 minutes passed. Then about you coming home late or about the car? Daniel actually laughed out loud. Alone in the hallway of a restaurant at 10:00 at night. Both, he typed.
She's thorough. Another minute, then she sounds like someone I'd like. Daniel's chest did the complicated thing again. He stood there in that hallway for another moment. Phone in his hand, and then he typed, "Good night, Victoria.
Good night, Daniel." He walked out to the train. He was smiling the whole way home. He stopped smiling when he got upstairs and found a note from Mrs. Perkins on his door that said, "In her precise schoolteacher handwriting: 'Daniel, Amara had a nightmare.'
She's fine now, sleeping, but she asked for you. Come by when you're home regardless of the time. E Perkins. He knocked softly on Mrs. Perkins' door.