The wine was still untouched when he finally spoke.
Lorenzo Salvatore had the face of a man who had spent considerable time deciding what kind of face to have. Smooth, patient, assembled with deliberate intention. He sat with one ankle crossed over his knee as though this were his regular table and she had made the reservation, as though the last twenty minutes of her life had been a mutual arrangement that neither of them needed to acknowledge. He watched her with the calm of someone who understood that most of the work happened before anyone opened their mouth. She had sat across from men like him in a professional capacity, men who had curated their approachability the way curators arranged exhibitions, everything placed to produce a specific response in the viewer. She knew what she was looking at.
