And while she raised her glass to thirty-eight women, my eyes went past her, across the private room, to the young hostess at the side table with a water jug in her hand.
Who had gone completely still, halfway through pouring.
PART 2 — THREE YEARS OF COMPS
I did the arithmetic that night at the office desk.
Three years. A hundred and twelve visits by Constance Rook, usually with between two and eleven guests. Every one of them comped on my instruction because Tobias asked me to.
Sixty-one thousand four hundred dollars at menu price.
I am not a woman who counts meals for family. I want that down. My own mother eats here twice a month and I have never once put it through the till.
But my mother has never stood in my dining room and told people she owns it.
The comps were never the money. The comps were the permission. Every free lunch was a small public proof, in front of her friends, that this restaurant was her son’s and she could do as she liked in it.
And I had signed every one of those comp slips myself.
PART 3 — THE CARD
Here is where the withdrawals came from.
In 2021 I gave Tobias a business card for supplier runs, because he had a van and I did not, and because the fish market opens at four and I was already in by six.
A card on my account, with a monthly limit, for fish and vegetables.
Over the last fourteen months, eleven thousand dollars of it went on things that were not fish.
A hotel in Linmouth, four times. A jeweller on Carrick Street, twice. Two dinners at a restaurant I would not be seen dead in. And, from the May, a regular transfer of three hundred dollars a month to a personal account that my bank could not identify.
I was going to confront him with it in the September.
Then Constance leaned across a table of thirty-eight women with my bottle in her hand and told them it all came out of this place.
She knew. She had known the whole time.
She had been eating my food for free while her son spent my money on a girl, and she was proud of both.
PART 4 — THE HOSTESS
Aurelie is twenty-six and she has been front of house at Saltmarch since the January.
Tobias recommended her. He said a friend’s daughter was looking for work and was brilliant with people.
She is. She is the best host I have had.
The three hundred a month is going into her account.
She was standing at that side table with a jug of water when Constance said gorgeous young girl, and I watched her hand stop over a glass and not move.
Constance Rook had never once looked at her. She had been served by her four times that year and had not looked at her face.
