That Friday she decided to find out how far it went.
“The full tasting menu for everybody,” she said. “And open the reserve bottles from the cellar. Nothing cheap today.”
Her friends clapped.
The bill was going to be over twenty thousand dollars and every person in that room knew it except the one who had ordered it.
Declan tried once more. “We can still stop this.”
“No. Serve it.”
Constance took over the private room like a hostess. Scallops, tartare, flatbreads, the dry-aged sirloin, the sauces. The first reserve bottles came up.
I brought the best one out myself.
I was pouring it round the table when Constance reached up and took the bottle out of my hand.
She held it against her own chest, looked round at thirty-eight women, and said:
“Give me that. She’s good at working — that’s what you keep her for. Pour for yourselves, ladies.”
They laughed. All of them. One of them said, “She cooks beautifully, but she’s very ordinary, isn’t she?”
I kept my hands at my sides and kept smiling.
Then one of them asked, “And Tobias? We never see him.”
Constance leaned in like she was about to give them the best news of the year.
“My son’s never been happier. He’s got a gorgeous young girl who’s absolutely wrapped round his finger.”
The table went quiet.
So did I.
Constance laughed. “Oh, don’t pull those faces. Juliet’s never home. She lives here. Tobias knows how to enjoy himself.”
And a woman at the far end said, “On what money?”
Constance lifted my bottle.
“This place’s, of course. It all stays in the family.”
I had been looking at withdrawals on my business account for three months. Hotels. Jewellery. Transfers I could not explain.
What I had not known until that second was that his mother knew every bit of it.
