Part Three: Thomas
He stood up.
Not quickly. Not dramatically. He stood up in the particular way of someone who has decided something and is not in a hurry, because being in a hurry would suggest uncertainty about the decision.
He was thirty-four years old and wore a dark suit that he wore well without appearing to think about it. He was not tall in a way that commanded rooms, but he moved through them in a way that had a similar effect — something in the quality of his movement that suggested he was accustomed to being where he was going.
He walked from table seven toward the front of the room.
The distance was not great — perhaps thirty feet — but in the silence that had followed Isabelle’s words, each step registered. People turned. The MC, who had been standing to one side with the specific expression of a professional managing an unexpected situation, did not move.
Isabelle watched Thomas come with the expression she had been wearing throughout: the ironic smile, the held glass, the posture of someone who had said the thing they wanted to say and was prepared to be right about it.
She was prepared for him to be angry, perhaps. Or embarrassed. She had not thought through, in detail, what she expected, because she had not thought it through seriously — she had thought only as far as the moment of saying it, and the small satisfaction of it, and not much further.
He stopped a few feet from her.
He looked at her with an expression that was entirely neutral — not wounded, not offended, not performing dignity in the showy way of someone who wanted credit for being dignified. Simply composed, in the way of a person who had no particular need for the moment to be different from what it was.
Before he could speak, Renaud stepped forward.
