Le Chien Fumant is a forty-minute drive from the Arena and worth every minute, in the way that things are worth things when you didn't know you needed them.
Jade arrives two minutes after noon and finds Nolan already at a corner table near the window of course he's already there, she has established that he is always early and performs being late as a social strategy, and she has no idea why she found this surprising the first time. He's not in practice clothes. Dark jeans, a grey henley, his coat on the back of the chair. He looks, without the context of the Arena around him, like someone she is meeting for the first time in the version of the story where they met somewhere other than a fluorescent examination room.
She sits down. A server appears. She orders the cassoulet on his recommendation without looking at the menu.
"You didn't read the menu," he says.
"You said the cassoulet was worth the drive. I'm testing the assertion."
"What if you don't like cassoulet?"
"I like cassoulet."
He takes a sip of water. "How did you know before you read the menu that they had it?"
"You told me last night."
"I told you it was worth arguing against efficient lunches. I didn't specify cassoulet."
She looks at him. "You mentioned it when you came to my office. A cassoulet that would constitute an argument."
"You remembered that."
"I remember most things."
He looks at her with an expression she's been cataloging for weeks something between attention and consideration, the face he makes when she says something that requires filing. She holds his gaze and doesn't clarify the statement, because it is true and requires no clarification.
They eat.
This is, she realizes partway through, different from the family dinner. At the family dinner, they were performing. There was an audience and a script and she had spent considerable energy maintaining both. Here there is no audience. The agreement does not cover this lunch she said so last night and he didn't argue. This is just two people in a restaurant on a Friday in November, and that simplicity is either completely fine or not fine at all, and she has been going back and forth on which one it is since she got in her car this morning.
The cassoulet is exceptional.
"You were right," she says.
He says nothing. She can tell he's choosing not to say I told you because he knows she knows he was right and saying it would add nothing.
This is another thing she has been cataloging.
"Tell me about Théo," she says. "Not the hockey version. The actual version."
He sets down his fork. He looks out the window at the street a moment of genuine consideration, not delay. "He's funnier than I am. Better with people. Walked into a room at twelve and made it easier for everyone in it." A pause. "He got our mother's social instincts and I got our father's way of taking up space."
"That's not a criticism of yourself."
"It's not. They're both useful." He picks up his fork again. "He played center until he was seventeen and the coach moved him to defense because he reads a room any room, including a defensive zone better than almost anyone I've played with. He was furious about it for a year."
"Is he still furious?"
"No. He's good at it. He knows he's good at it." He takes a bite. "He'll tell you he prefers defense now. I think he still sometimes misses center. He just decided to be better at what's in front of him."
She considers this. "Is that a family trait?"
He looks at her. The look is level, a little slow, the kind that arrives when something has been recognized.
"Maybe," he says.
They are quiet for a moment. Outside, a streetcar passes, its sound reaching them faintly through the window glass.
"Marc Olivier was in the building on Wednesday," she says. She says it the way she'd note something in a file information delivered cleanly, no weight added.
"I know. Bap mentioned it."
"He didn't approach me." She moves a piece of sausage in the cassoulet. "He saw me in the corridor and he nodded. That was it."
"Good."
"It was fine." She pauses. "I want you to know that it was fine. Because I think at some point it's going to seem like I don't want the reason this started to become the main thing it is."
He is very still.
"The reason it started," she says, more carefully, "was Marc Olivier in a corridor and three seconds of poor decision-making. But that's not " She stops. She picks up her water glass. "I'm trying to say that if this is useful to you for other reasons, I want to know that. And if it isn't, I want to know that too."
The restaurant is busy around them Friday lunch crowd, conversations overlapping, a child at the next table making very strong opinions known about something on her plate. Nolan sets his fork down parallel to his knife in the precise, tidy way he does everything that involves placement.
"It's useful to me," he says.
She waits.
"I have a press event in three weeks. Management has been suggesting for two seasons that I present a more settled image publicly. There have been some stories." He says this without defensiveness, just information. "Having someone I'm with at that event changes the narrative."
She nods. "So it's useful."
"Yes."
"Okay." She picks up her fork. "Then we're both getting something."
He looks at her. Something moves in his expression something she can see arriving and cannot quite name before it's settled back into neutral.
"We are," he says.
They finish their lunch.
On the way out, he holds the door. This is something he does small logistical courtesies that don't announce themselves, just happen. He held her coat last week at the family dinner without making it a gesture. He had remembered she takes her coffee black before she'd told him in the car that first night.
She stands on the sidewalk in the November cold and pulls on her gloves.
"Thank you," she says. "For the lunch."
"The cassoulet made the argument."
"It did." She looks up at him. The afternoon light is flat and pale, the kind of winter light that doesn't cast shadows. "Same time next week?"
He looks at her for a moment. He does not perform surprise.
"Yes," he says.
She walks to her car.
She is three blocks away when she realizes that she suggested it. He did not suggest it. She did.
She drives back to the Arena. She has two afternoon appointments. She attends them with complete focus. She does excellent work.
She does not think about the restaurant, or about the way he said it's useful to me with a pause before it that she has been filing away without knowing what to file it under.
She thinks about it in the car on the way home.
She thinks about it while she feeds Cortex.
She picks up her pen. She does not have a notebook in front of her. She is sitting on her couch. She sets the pen down.
She opens her phone. She opens a new message.
The cassoulet was exceptional, she types. You were right.
She sends it before she can revise it into something more neutral.
His reply comes in less than thirty seconds.
I know.
She puts the phone down. She looks at the ceiling. Cortex climbs onto the couch beside her, turns twice, and settles against her hip.
She thinks: this is manageable.
She thinks: I suggested next week.
She thinks about the pause before it's useful to me and whether the pause was before the sentence or inside it before the it's or before the useful.
She picks the pen back up. She sets it down.
She goes to bed.