Re: [restaurant; ren & hannah]
She nodded her agreement, because he was right about facts and distractions, decoys and things hidden. It was one of the very first things she'd learned. In that house in Florida, with a husband who wasn't really hers, she'd had to learn to pretend to be a woman she wasn't. And details got her through that. Teensy, tiny details, and that was all she'd needed, and it was a little sad to her that no one realized. "If you sound like you know what you're saying, like you believe it, like it's the thing that matters, people believe that. Tiny, tiny things make people think you're saying what matters." She gave him a smile, a knowing thing that was dim like secretive corners where light doesn't entirely reach. "I think we sound like people with lots and lots of secrets."
The look she gave him was considering, thinking, mulling, and she finally shook her head and caused copper to cascade over her shoulder with careless abandon. "I think you might tire of driving a Lamborghini around the continent, and maybe you would've ended up right here, in this weird and strange place, trying to figure out the next step on your artistic journey. And maybe you'd come here to write. Strange and quiet places are really good for writing, or that's what the writers that keep getting reblogged on Tumblr say."
His grandfather. His grandfather, and she didn't comment immediately about it, because his sentence was tiny, a mouthful, and she knew that meant it was something important. She wanted to focus on it, marinate when she asked. "The tree is the lie, but I tried! I did try, so maybe that was cheating. The ground was too frozen, and when it had thawed enough to do it I wasn't sure I wanted permanence there. I planted it in a pot, and I'm going to have to find someplace bigger for it soon." She wiggled an ankle as she talked, thoughtless motion from the burnished girl. "The mansion was haunted divinity. It's that one on the north side. And New York has so many cracks in sidewalks, and a bunch of them have weeds fighting to push through, and I think that's beautiful."
She took another sip of her wine, and then she looked at him directly and with that unflinchingly open gaze. "Do you want to talk about your grandfather?" Beat. "You're allowed to say no."