He uncapped a heavy gold pen.
"Go on. Walk over there, sit down, and prove me wrong. $150,000. What do you say?"
That was when Nia stopped walking. That was when the glasses on her tray trembled. And that was when the whole restaurant, sensing the way crowds always sense these things that something was about to happen, went quiet.
Nia set her tray down on the empty table beside her. She did it slowly, deliberately, and the soft clink of the glasses settling was the loudest sound in the room. Then she turned to face Bradford Vance fully, and for the first time all evening, she looked him directly in the eye.
"You want me to play that piano?" she said. Her voice was steady, quiet.
"For $150,000. That's the bet." Bradford grinned. He was enjoying this enormously. "But let's be clear about the terms, sweetheart. I'm not paying for noise. I'm not paying for you to bang on it like a child. You have to actually play it. And since I'm a generous man, I'll let the room decide." He gestured grandly at the surrounding tables, at the dozens of diners now watching with open curiosity. "If these good people think you played—really played—then the check is yours. And if you can't, then you go back to carrying trays, and we all have a good laugh and no harm done. Deal?"
In the doorway to the kitchen, the owner of Maison Lauron, a small, elegant man named Henri Lauron, had appeared. Drawn by the silence, he started forward to intervene, to put a stop to whatever cruelty was unfolding in his dining room. But Nia caught his eye, and she gave the smallest shake of her head. Let me, her look said. Let me handle this. Henri stopped.
Nia turned back to Bradford Vance. And something had changed in her face: the flicker from before, the old buried thing, had steadied into something else—something that looked to the people watching almost like sorrow. But underneath the sorrow was something harder, something that had been waiting a very long time.
"Sit down," Nia said.
Bradford blinked. "Excuse me?"
"Sit down," she repeated, "and listen."
A ripple went through the room. Somebody at a far table actually gasped. Bradford's smile flickered just for an instant, but he recovered it, and he spread his hands and lowered himself theatrically back into his chair.
"By all means," he said. "The floor is yours."