Chapter 1
Chapter 1: Wrong Table
The blind date had been Priya's idea, which meant Nisha had approximately forty-five minutes left before she could blame Priya for everything.
She'd said yes in a moment of weakness — the specific weakness of a Friday afternoon when her game build had crashed for the third time and Priya was standing at her apartment door with wine and the expression she wore when she'd already decided something. "His name is Arjun," Priya had said, opening the wine without being invited to. "He works in finance but he's not finance, he's just— he does something with sustainable investment. He's been to Oaxaca. He has good taste in restaurants."
"Those are extremely shallow criteria," Nisha had said.
"All first-date criteria are shallow. That's the point of first dates. You go, you decide if there's anything to go deeper on, and then you either make plans or you politely exit."
"And if I don't want to make plans."
"Then you've had a nice dinner you didn't cook. Which, given what I saw in your fridge last Tuesday, is a public service." Priya had poured the wine with the authority of someone who considered this matter closed. "His name is Arjun. He's thirty. The restaurant is Ancora on King. Thursday at seven. I've sent you his photo."
Nisha had looked at the photo. Arjun was attractive in an inoffensive way — the kind of face you wouldn't notice on a street but which photographed well. She'd said "fine" with the energy of someone issuing a warning and had spent the next four days telling herself she wasn't dreading it.
She was, a little. Not Arjun specifically. Just the general exercise of presenting yourself to a stranger as a person who could be dated, which required a particular kind of optimism she was out of practice with.
Ancora was the kind of restaurant that understood what it was doing. Not too loud, not too quiet, the lighting calibrated to the specific warmth of you could be someone's whole evening here. Nisha had arrived at six-fifty-five because she was always early and always slightly annoyed by it, and the hostess had taken her name and said, with the smooth competence of someone who had done this a thousand times, "Right this way — your table's ready."
Table for two, window-adjacent. Nisha settled in, ordered water, and looked at the menu without reading it. She had the particular alert stillness of someone waiting — not anxious, not exactly, just present in a way that everyday life didn't always require.
Seven o'clock. Seven-oh-three.
She checked her phone. Nothing from Arjun. She texted Priya: I'm here. No sign of sustainable investment man.
Priya replied immediately: He confirmed this morning!! Give him five minutes he's probably parking
Nisha put the phone away and looked at the restaurant. It was busy in the specific way of a Thursday evening, the tables filling with the week-is-almost-over energy — people who'd earned their dinner, sitting across from people they wanted to share it with. She watched a couple three tables over argue mildly about the wine list. She watched a man near the door check his phone, then the room, then his phone again.
Seven-oh-seven.
She was about to text Priya again when the hostess materialised at her shoulder with the smooth soundlessness of good front-of-house training. "Your party's arrived," she said, with the particular phrasing that implied Nisha should look up, and Nisha looked up.
The man following the hostess to her table was not the man in the photo.
This was not an instant read — she was not a person who memorised faces from photographs — but it was a rapid one, assembled in the two seconds it took him to navigate between tables and arrive at hers. Taller than the photo had suggested Arjun was. Brown hair, not dark. The wrong face entirely, though the wrong face was, she registered in passing, a very good face — the kind that resolved into attractive a beat after you first saw it, as if it needed a moment's looking to give up its full effect.
He looked at her. He looked at the table. Something crossed his face — recognition that something was off, quickly followed by the particular recovery of a person who was going to handle whatever this was.
"Hi," he said. "I'm — hi." He looked at the chair across from her and at the hostess, who had already moved on with the blameless efficiency of someone whose job was to connect people with tables, not to verify which people went with which tables. "I think there might be—"
"You're not Arjun," Nisha said.
"No." He looked relieved, which was interesting. "I'm looking for — I'm meeting someone. Sophie. My table should be—" He glanced around the restaurant with the specific look of a man who had just realised that finding an alternate table required a hostess who was now four tables away seating someone else.
"Arjun is the person I'm meeting," Nisha said. "Or was supposed to be meeting. He's—" She checked her phone again. Seven-eleven. "Running late, apparently."
The man looked at her, then at the empty chair, then at the restaurant, then back at her, in the sequence of someone running an internal calculation. "I think they put me at the wrong table," he said. "Which means I either go hunt down the hostess or I stand here like an idiot while she comes back."
"She'll come back," Nisha said. "She's good."
"Right." He stood at the edge of the table with the slightly awkward quality of someone who has been stopped mid-motion and isn't sure what to do with his hands. He was wearing a navy jacket over a white shirt — slightly overdressed for a Thursday, or appropriately dressed, depending on who he was trying to impress. He had the look of someone who had made an effort. "I'm sorry about this. The reservation was under Calloway—"
"It's fine." Nisha turned her water glass in her hands. "Wrong table. Not a catastrophe."
"No." He almost smiled. It was, she noticed, a very good almost-smile — the kind that arrived in the eyes before it reached the mouth. "Still. Not the first impression anyone wants to make."
"You're not making an impression," she said. "You're standing next to a table. Those are different things."
He did smile then, the full version, and Nisha looked at her water glass.
The hostess came back in four minutes, apologetic and smooth, and sorted out the confusion with the practiced calm of someone who had undoubtedly done this before: his table was the one two down, also a window table, also set for two. He thanked her. He looked at Nisha.
"Sorted," he said.
"Good," she said.
He went to his table. Nisha watched him go — not watching him, exactly; just registering the movement in her peripheral vision the way you registered things that had been briefly relevant — and picked up the menu properly.
Seven-seventeen.
Her phone buzzed. Priya: Arjun just texted me — he's so sorry, work emergency, he's going to be like 45 mins late minimum, he says order anything you want and put it on him
Nisha stared at this for a long moment.
Then she looked at the table two down.
The man — Calloway, apparently, or that was his last name — was looking at his phone with an expression that, from this distance, suggested he had received a similar message. He set the phone down. He looked at the menu. He looked at his phone again. Then he looked up, across the restaurant, and his gaze found hers with the directness of someone who had been looking in the same direction.
He raised his eyebrows slightly. Same problem?
Nisha looked at him for one measured beat. Then she raised hers back. Apparently.
He picked up his wine list. She picked up hers. The restaurant went on being a restaurant around them, all conversation and cutlery sounds and the low warm light of a Thursday that was almost Friday.
At seven-twenty-two, he stood up, picked up his menu and his water glass, and walked back to her table.
"I realise this is potentially very strange," he said. "But I've been stood up — or near enough — and you've been stood up — or near enough — and there are two menus at an empty table and this restaurant smells extraordinary and I've been in this city for three days and this is the first actual restaurant I've been to and I would very much like to have dinner." He paused. "With someone. If that's — I'm not—" He looked faintly pained. "I promise I'm not usually this inarticulate."
Nisha looked at him. She thought about Arjun, forty-five minutes away and apologetic. She thought about the empty chair and the Thursday evening and the specific quality of a restaurant that understood what it was doing.
"Sit down," she said. "Before someone thinks you're waiting for a table."
He sat. He set his menu down. He looked at her across the candlelight with the expression of someone who had just pulled off something he wasn't certain was a good idea and was beginning to think it might be.
"I'm Jamie," he said.
"Nisha," she said.
"Well," said Jamie, picking up the wine list with the air of someone investing in the situation, "I think we've established that neither of us is who the other one was expecting tonight. The question is whether that's a problem."
Nisha looked at him. He was watching her with the straightforward attentiveness of someone who had already decided he was interested and was curious whether she was going to be, too.
"Order the wine," she said. "We'll find out."