Elena arranged it without asking anyone's preference, because Elena considered preferences to be optional information that she gathered when convenient and disregarded when they were not. She announced at lunch that they were going to a restaurant in the Malasana neighborhood at eight, that it was an establishment she had eaten at since it opened thirty years ago, and that appropriate dress was required, by which she meant something other than what they were currently wearing.
They went. All of them: Elena and Valentina and Diego on his night off and Ranon and Sera and one of Elena's friends, a woman in her late sixties who had apparently known Elena since before Madrid had the particular coffee shop culture it currently had and who spoke three languages in the same sentence with the specific ease of someone who had stopped tracking which one she was in.
