The Apology

Week three went out clean. My pass, sixty covers, last plate away at twenty-two minutes past nine, and at ten o’clock Esme Enright sent a photograph of a whiteboard in the Lewisham hall with a running total on it in marker pen, and the total was forty-one thousand and change, and nobody said anything about the forty thousand that was not on it.

We wiped down. The crew went. Deja went at twenty to twelve with her hood up, and at the door she said, “Text me when you’re home,” to me, in a voice that meant something else, and I said I would.

Then it was me and him and a kitchen with the extraction off, which is the quietest a kitchen ever is.

“Rule two,” I said. “I’m asking.”

He put down the cloth.

“Here?”

“Not here. There’s a bench on the river wall past the second arch.…