It would take a leather binder behind a booth, and a check with too many zeros, and eventually a foundation with my name on it, to teach me that the invisibility had never been the truth about me.
It had only ever been other people’s failure to look.
Chapter 3 — The Well-Dressed Couple
They came in a little after eight, a well-dressed couple, the kind who wear money quietly, in the cut of a jacket and the shine of good shoes rather than anything flashy, and they were seated in one of my sections, in the deep velvet corner booth.
They ordered like people who had never once in their lives looked at the right side of a menu, which, I would realize much later, was itself a small tell, because it was slightly too perfect a performance of careless wealth, the kind of thing people do when they are playing a part rather than living it.
Real regulars at a place like ours had their habits, their usual bottle, their little particularities.
These two ordered lavishly and generically, the way you order when the point is not the food but the cover story the food provides.
They did not glance at a single price.
