Vincent, without looking up from his guest, said under the music, "Breathe, Maya. You're safe in this seat. It's the only thing you have to do just now — breathe, and let him look, and let him learn."
So she breathed. And she stayed.
Chapter 4: Stay Close
If Vincent Corso was surprised by the woman on his lap, he conspired with the whole room never to show it. For the remaining hour of the truce dinner he was, if anything, more at ease than before Maya's arrival — a man whose evening had been improved rather than interrupted. He included her with small, public courtesies that built the fiction without straining it: tasting his dessert first, then offering it to her; asking whether the band was playing her song yet. Each gesture was light. Each one was also, Maya understood, a notice posted where the room could read it.
"You're a pianist as well as a waitress," the elder said to her at one point, benignly. "Mr. Barrett tells me we heard you earlier."
"Relief only, sir," Maya said. "When Andre rests his hands."
"Play us out, then, when the coffee comes. Something old." He glanced at Vincent with dry humour. "Unless your Mr. Corso keeps you entirely for conversation."
"He can be persuaded," Maya said, and Vincent, obligingly, was; and so at the end of the meal she rose — with his hand steadying her elbow only as long as balance required, and no longer — and played the dinner to its close at the piano, her wrist still remembering fingers around it, her own fingers steady enough to do her father credit. She did not look at the bar. When she finished, the elder applauded with genuine pleasure, and the truce had been kept in music, which was how the Velvet Note preferred its history written.
Closing the evening was a choreography Vincent conducted without seeming to conduct anything. Coats were brought. Hands were shaken at the door with exactly the warmth the occasion prescribed and not a degree more. Tony walked the elder to his car himself. And when Ryan, among the last of the O'Donnell party, made for the door with his coat still over his arm, Vincent spoke once, quietly, to the man at his side.
"Danny."
That was all. One quiet word. The man — dark, unremarkable, a Corso man Maya had seen a hundred times polishing glasses and minding the side door — nodded and fell in, unhurried, to show Ryan Cole out. Not to the street with the others; to a pause at the threshold, a hand not quite touching an elbow, a few sentences Maya could not hear and did not need to. She saw Ryan's face change. She saw him look back once, not at her but at Vincent, and then go out into the wet night with the message in his keeping, whatever its wording had been.
The door closed. The lock turned. Lucia began, at the far end of the room, to count a till with the air of a woman for whom the evening had contained nothing remarkable, and Maya loved her for it.
"My office," Vincent said to Maya, not unkindly. "When you're ready. Two minutes, or ten."
His office was up a half-flight behind the stage, a room the music reached only as a muffled warmth through the wall. A desk, a lamp, a safe, two chairs that did not match. He took one. He left the other and also, pointedly, the space around it. When Maya sat, her hands began to shake — not the managed tremor of the booth but the real after-shock, arriving now that performance was over — so she folded them hard together in her lap.
Vincent noticed. He did not touch her. He did not reach across and still them with his own hands, and she was more grateful for that restraint than she could yet say. Instead he stood, poured water from a carafe, set it on the desk's edge within her reach rather than pressing it on her, and sat down again at his distance.
"Drink when you can," he said. "There's no clock on this."
She managed the glass in both hands. The water was cold and ordinary and excellent. "I've put you in a position," she said, at last. "In front of him. In front of them. I didn't think — I did think. It was the only seat in the room I was sure he wouldn't — I'm sorry."
"You apologised with your eyes before you sat down," Vincent said. "I accepted before you finished. We're not going to relitigate it." A pause. "Are you hurt?"
She looked at her wrist. There was no mark worth showing, which was, somehow, the ugliest part of it. "No."
"If that answer changes in an hour, I want the new one."
"All right."
He waited, and in the waiting there was no pressure she could detect. So, haltingly, she gave him the honest minimum she had decided on somewhere between the corridor and the piano. "His name is Ryan Cole. He's my ex-fiancé. I left him a year ago. He's — dangerous. Not in a loud way. In a paperwork-and-doorways way. I moved twice so he wouldn't have my address. I don't know how he knew to look here, or if he did know. He may just have walked in with them and found a prize he hadn't expected."
"Both matter," Vincent said. "We'll learn which."
"He said — " She stopped.
"Tell me or don't," Vincent said, without edge. "It stays in this room either way."
"He grabbed my wrist in the service corridor. He said I was coming home. Home," she repeated, and was angry at the crack in the word. "I don't have a home with him. I've made sure of it. That's all I'm telling anyone tonight. There's more — there's a great deal more — but it's mine, and I'm not ready, and I won't be handled into telling it because a bad night happened in your club."
"Good," Vincent said, so simply that she blinked. "Don't be."
She stared. "Just — good?"
"You work for my sister more than for me, whatever the sign says. You play my piano. You were frightened in my house, and in my house nobody is touched without consent — that's not a favour I did you, Maya, that's a rule he broke and you didn't." He rose, but only to stand at the window, giving her the room's greater share. "I can help. With the practical things first: how you get home tonight, whether he learns where that is, what my people say to his people about what he saw. More than that, if you ask. You don't have to accept any of it to keep your job, your shifts, or this conversation forgotten by morning. Say no, and it is no."
"Why offer at all?" she asked, honestly.
"Because you chose my seat out of every seat in Chicago," he said, "and I'd like that not to be a mistake you have to be brave about twice."