She looked at Alexander. He was, in fact, watching Adelaide's plate with what Victoria would have described, at that moment, as distaste - the faint compression around his eyes, the quality of studied tolerance. There it is, she thought, with a small flicker of satisfaction. Common ground.
Adelaide ate with uncomplicated enthusiasm, working through the sandwich with a speed that suggested she'd skipped lunch. When she was down to perhaps the last third - enough to have made her point - Alexander reached across and pulled her plate toward himself, out of her reach. Not dramatically. Just: removed it. Like a man moving a glass that had been left too close to the table edge.
Flat. Give it back.
Alexander looked at her. Nothing on his face moved.
Victoria held very still, her fork suspended.
The silence ran for eight seconds. Nine. Then Adelaide exhaled through her nose, picked up her water glass, and drank. That was it. She just accepted it - like this was a negotiation they'd already completed long ago, and she knew exactly which hills she'd decided not to die on, and this wasn't one of them.
Victoria looked down at her entrée. She ate. She was very aware, suddenly, that she had not followed a single moment of what had just happened between them. Not a single moment.
The marble floor at Clarice's entrance had a slight incline toward the door. Victoria had noted this when they arrived.
She let herself tip sideways. Alexander's hand closed around her elbow immediately - strong, automatic. She looked up with a breath of startled gratitude and let the moment be exactly as long as it needed to be.
"Careful," he said. One word, already withdrawing.
"I'm so sorry." She kept her hand on his forearm a half-beat. "Alexander - I just realized, after all this time today, I never actually got your number-"
"What are you wearing?" he said.
She blinked. "I'm - sorry?"
"The scent." His eyes had gone slightly inward, tracking something she couldn't see. "What is it."
She'd selected it three weeks ago from a shortlist of seven options. A French house, limited-edition, the kind of understated sophistication she'd read that men like Alexander responded to. She was glad she'd made a strong choice. "Maison Delacroix," she said. "It's quite rare, a limited-edition run-"
He'd already produced a card from his breast pocket and was writing something. He held it out.
She took it.
Maison Delacroix. Just that. In his handwriting. The name she'd given him, written back.
"Thank you for this afternoon," Alexander said. The sentence was a door closing.
Her father's car was at the curb. She was inside it before she'd fully reoriented herself. The card sat in her lap.
She held it and assembled an interpretation that still left her a path forward. She was good at this. She had a lot of practice.