The first course went down like a dress rehearsal where the lead actor kept improvising. Mercer ordered the wagyu for the table — "the real stuff, not the knockoff" — and held up a hand when the sommelier tried to suggest pairings. "Sah-kee," he said, drawing it out in two syllables, looking to the Japanese side for approval. "We gotta do it right. Sah-kee for my friends from across the water."
The sommelier's smile didn't move. "Sake, yes, of course. We have a very nice junmai—"
"That's what I said. Sah-kee." Mercer laughed, and his laugh had a rehearsed edge, like a man who'd learned that laughing first kept other people from laughing at him. "Yuki, tell your dad I'm becoming a real Japanese businessman. Gonna need the haircut."
Yuki Arakawa smiled without showing teeth. She was thirty-eight and looked like she had been watching men like Julian Mercer since she was twelve and had never once been surprised. "My father speaks English, Mr. Mercer," she said pleasantly. "Fluently."
"Even better!" Mercer boomed, and clapped the table. "No secrets at my table."
Chairman Arakawa inclined his head a fraction of an inch. Takeshi Mori, the advisor, murmured something too low for Maya to catch. She set down the bread plates without a sound and retreated to the alcove, where the low light turned everything the color of old pennies.
It was going to be one of those nights. She could feel it the way she could feel a storm coming off Lake Michigan — a pressure change, a thinning of the air.
"—and I said to the board," Mercer was telling the table, carving into his appetizer with the side of his fork, "you don't buy a robotics company for its robots. You buy it for the engineers who built the robots, and then you teach those engineers how America does business." He pointed his fork at Yuki. "No offense. It's a compliment. Your people build the best machines on earth. My people sell them."
Dana Whitaker, the silver-bobbed CFO, made a small sound into her napkin that might have been a cough. Ray Delgado, the operations VP, nodded along with the enthusiasm of a man whose mortgage depended on nodding. The Japanese guests ate in the careful silence of people who had decided, collectively and without discussion, to let the evening happen to them.
Maya brought the fish course — butter-poached halibut, fennel, a saffron beurre blanc she'd watched the line plate forty times tonight — and set each plate down from the left, synchronized with the runner, the way Daniel had drilled them. Six inches from the edge. No fingerprints on the rim. Invisible.
Mercer stopped her with two fingers raised, the way you'd hail a cab.
"Hang on, hang on. Maya —" he squinted at her name tag, then at her face, then back at the tag, as if the two needed reconciling. "Maya. That's exotic. Where's that from, Mexico?"
A small, hot wire tightened behind her sternum. She kept her eyes on the plate she was setting down. "It's just my name, sir."
"Just your name." He turned to the table, grinning. "You hear that? Just her name. These kids." He leaned toward Yuki conspiratorially. "You know what I love about this country? Anybody can be anything. This young lady right here — she could be running the place someday."
Dana Whitaker was studying her wineglass with tremendous focus. Takeshi Mori's expression hadn't changed in an hour. Yuki was watching Maya with an attention that felt almost physical — not pity, exactly. Inventory. She was taking Maya's measure the way she'd taken the room's.
"Thank you, sir," Maya said, because there was nothing else in the drawer. She withdrew.
In the alcove, Rosa passed her with a full tray and muttered, without moving her lips, "If he calls you sweetheart one more time I'm going to drop a soufflé on his head."
"He called me exotic," Maya said.
"Oh, I'm sorry, did the billionaire mispronounce your humanity?" Rosa's whisper was pure acid wrapped in a smile. "Go. Breathe. He's got forty minutes of dessert menus before we can legally kill him."
The main course passed in a haze of char and red wine and Mercer's monologue, which had now moved on to steel — his father's steel, Gary, Indiana, the dignity of making things — and Maya moved through it the way she'd been taught: present, efficient, absent. She refilled water glasses when they hit a third. She crumbed the table between courses with the little silver tool, sweeping invisible crumbs into her palm. The chairman's hands, she noticed, were spotted with age and perfectly still in his lap. Once, when she leaned in to clear his plate, he looked up at her and nodded — a small, grave acknowledgment, server to human being — and something in her chest loosened and then tightened again.
She must not think about Osaka tonight. That was the rule she'd made at fifteen, on the flight back to Chicago with Aunt Grace, holding a suitcase that still smelled faintly of coffee and rain, watching the clouds over the Pacific and deciding that some things you keep in a locked room. The language was hers. The city was hers. She didn't lend them out.
Dessert menus arrived on the little silver stands, fanned like poker hands. Mercer picked his up, glanced at it, and set it down without reading it. He looked around the table — at Dana's tight smile, at Ray's empty nodding, at the three Japanese guests who had endured three hours of him without once letting their masks slip — and then his gaze traveled, with the slow inevitability of a spotlight, to the service alcove.
To Maya.
"Hey," he said, and crooked a finger. "Sweetheart. Come here a minute."
Chapter 3
The Wager
Maya crossed the Cedar Room with the dessert menus still warm from the printer in her hand, and every eye at the table followed her except the chairman's, which stayed on his water glass, and Yuki's, which had never left her since the fish course.
"Sit— no, stand right there," Mercer said, gesturing at a spot beside his chair like a director blocking a scene. "Ladies and gentlemen, I want you to meet the future of American hospitality." He beamed at the Japanese guests. "Go on, sweetheart. Tell everyone where you're from."