Lucas drove. I sat in the passenger seat and looked out the window and did not talk, which he allowed without comment, because Lucas had spent enough years being my brother to know the difference between silence that wanted company and silence that needed to be left entirely alone.
The restaurant was on the Upper East Side, the kind of place that had been in the same family for forty years and had resisted every attempt at renovation with the particular stubbornness of somewhere that knew exactly what it was. I had been here once, for the lunch with Margaret. I had not expected to come back.
The owner was a man named Aurelio. Late sixties, silver at the temples, the careful formality of someone who had spent decades making powerful people feel comfortable. He was an old family acquaintan
