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Chapter 14

KNOX

Knox had prepared for dinner with Lucy’s parents like a man preparing for a hostile deposition, and none of it survived the fourth floor.

There had been no invitation, not really. Lucy had set the terms on Saturday, over a sink full of buttercream—if this was going to go anywhere, he met her parents—and by Sunday her mother had taken the decision out of everyone’s hands. The summons came through Jane with the authority of a court order.

Monday, seven o’clock, Ming’s one night off the line, bring the budget.

Three instructions arrived by text after the summons, no greeting attached. Don’t be early. Don’t be late. Don’t be weird.

He had researched Flushing the same week he had researched everything else about her, which meant he knew the building was a 1962 co-op with a sound roof and an elevator that serviced six floors with the enthusiasm of a man approaching retirement. He knew Ming Wang had run his own kitchen for thirty years and now cooked someone else’s menu in a Chinese restaurant off the Expressway. He knew Mei-Lin Wang had survived something that her daughters only discussed in past tense. He knew all of it, and standing in the hallway outside apartment 4C with a tin of aged oolong he’d interrogated three tea merchants to find, he understood that none of his data applied.

“Rules,” Lucy said. She straightened his collar, which did not need straightening, which meant her hands wanted a job. “Don’t mention the restaurant unless they do. Don’t offer anyone money, advice, or a business plan. Don’t compliment the food like a critic. Eat like a person.”

“Define eating like a person.”

“Second helpings. No commentary on ratios.”

“You’re taking away my entire personality.”

“I’m aware.” She looked at the tea tin. “What did you bring my mother?”

“Tieguanyin. Aged. The man at the shop on Main Street said it was a gift for someone you intend to respect for a long time.”

Lucy stared at the tin. Then she stared at him. Whatever she was about to say got filed somewhere he couldn’t see, and she knocked on the door of her own parents’ apartment, which told him more about the architecture of this family than the co-op records had.

The door opened before her knuckles finished. Mei-Lin Wang was small and quick, with Lucy’s direct eyes and a cardigan the color of persimmons, and she looked at Knox the same amount of time it took Lucy to assess a delivery of flour.

“You’re taller than Jane said.”

“Jane undersells me.”

Knox inclined his head and offered her a greeting in Mandarin, a few careful words, the accent imperfect and the respect unmistakable. Mei-Lin’s eyebrows climbed toward her hairline. Whatever she had expected from the man Jane described, it had not included that.

“Jane undersells everyone. It keeps her in control of the room.” Mei-Lin stepped back to let them in. “Shoes there. Dinner is in one hour. You’re late, which means you’re folding.”

“Folding,” Knox said.

“Dumplings don’t make themselves. Lucy learned before she could ride a bike. You’ll learn before the soup boils. Come.”

The apartment was warm and small and entirely uninterested in impressing anyone. Knox cataloged it without meaning to, because cataloging was his resting state. The wall held family photos in no order he could detect. The sofa wore a blanket that looked like it had been folded the same direction for years. A glass cabinet kept dishes too good to use. And beside the kitchen doorway hung a framed menu with a red border and gold characters, the English subtitles set in a font from another decade. It read Golden Lotus, Roosevelt Avenue, with the lunch specials down the left side.

Knox looked at the menu for one second too long. Lucy’s hand pressed flat between his shoulder blades and steered him into the kitchen.

Ming Wang stood at the counter with a cleaver, reducing a pile of napa cabbage to confetti at a speed that should have required a license. He was lean and gray at the temples and had forearms that thirty years of woks had built and eight years behind someone else’s woks had not yet eroded. He did not stop cutting.

“You’re the budget,” Ming said.

“I’m the budget,” Knox agreed.

“Lucy says you doubled her estimate.”

“Her estimate was wrong.”

The cleaver stopped. The kitchen went still in a domestic, load-bearing fashion, with Jane suddenly upright in her chair at the kitchen table where she’d been pretending to read building records on her laptop.

“Wrong how?” Ming asked.