I watched her settle into the chair. Watched her fingers drift to the hollow of her throat, pressing there lightly, two fingertips against skin. A gesture that looked like feminine vulnerability. I knew better now. I'd seen her do it outside the hospital, in the rain, the night she stood under Dante's umbrella and smiled at me like I was something to be pitied.
"I thought you wouldn't come," she said, a smug lilt in her voice. "After all, you never replied to my messages."
The café was quiet. Two old men at the counter nursing espressos. The barista wiping glasses with studied disinterest. The hum of a refrigerator. The faint smell of roasted beans and something sweeter underneath, vanilla, maybe, or almond. A normal place. A place where normal things were supposed to happen.
I smiled calmly. My heart was steady, not a flicker of emotion breaking through. I had rehearsed this stillness. I had learned it from watching the men in Dante's world, the ones who could order terrible things without raising their voices, who understood that the person who speaks first from anger has already lost.