Yes.
He stopped there.
Tessa did not push.
Weeks passed before he told her more.
His mother, Lucia, had worked at Bellavita before it became Bellavita. The building had once housed a crowded neighborhood restaurant with red vinyl booths and a kitchen that never closed before midnight. Lucia washed dishes, made desserts, and sometimes cleaned the dining room after everyone left.
Salvatore spent Thursday evenings there because she could not afford childcare.
Table nine had been their table.
“She sat there?” Tessa asked aloud before catching herself.
He nodded.
Then he signed, She taught me numbers at this table. Then letters. Then how to lie politely when food was terrible.
Tessa laughed.
Salvatore looked around the room with an expression she had never seen on him before.
Softness.
When he became successful enough to buy the building years later, he kept one room almost unchanged in proportion, even though everything else was rebuilt in dark wood and polished stone. He came every Thursday because it had been the one night each week that belonged entirely to his mother.
Lucia had died twelve years earlier.
The city had turned his weekly ritual into evidence of menace because nobody had known the history and Salvatore had never corrected them.
“Why not tell people?” Tessa asked.
He signed back, They would make it sentimental.
“You say that like sentiment is contagious.”
Dangerous disease.
She laughed again.
Outside the room, the situation with Brett worsened.
One Saturday, a family complained that Tessa ignored an allergy request. She knew she had never received it. When the manager, Victor, reviewed the handwritten service ticket, the allergy note had been added in Brett’s handwriting after the order was entered.
Tessa showed him the log she had kept.
Victor’s face changed as he read dates and details.
“This has been going on for a month?”
“Yes.”
“Why didn’t you come to me sooner?”
“Because I wanted something more useful than my word against his.”
Victor called Brett into the office.
