Amara answered in Mandarin that she had faced nearly that problem in a clinic rather than a boardroom, and that the technique was the same, you repeated the figure back as a clarification, you gave the correction a door to walk through without carrying blame with it.
She demonstrated, briefly and elegantly, the phrasing she would use, a sentence that sounded like a question about a document and functioned as a rescue, and Wei Zhang smiled the private smile of a man adding a person to a list he kept in his head.
Liu Fang asked whether American negotiators understood how much could be communicated by what was left unsaid, and Amara said some did and some mistook silence for agreement, which was the most expensive misunderstanding she knew of in either language.
That observation drew a genuine laugh from Wei Zhang, the first of the evening, and heads turned at nearby tables at the sound, because laughter from that corner, in that register, told the room which way the evening had decided to go.
Preston cleared his throat and announced, to no one in particular, that the food was getting cold, which was true in the literal sense and entirely beside the point in every other, and nobody at his table reached for a fork.
The main courses had in fact arrived during the conversation and sat steaming gently, attended by another server Daniel had quietly dispatched, because the machinery of the restaurant, to its credit, had understood that its best server was otherwise and importantly occupied.
Amara noticed the plates and, without leaving the conversation, shifted seamlessly in Mandarin to the meal itself, describing for Liu Fang which dish had been prepared separately, confirming the sauce served alongside, and apologizing for the delay her own situation had imposed on their dinner.
Wei Zhang waved the apology away in Mandarin, saying a meal that taught you something about the people at your table was never delayed, only improved, and that Chicago had so far offered him rain, an extraordinary conversation, and the prospect of fish he had not yet tasted.
She translated that, at his request, for Preston, rendering it faithfully and completely, including the compliment and excluding nothing, because fidelity was the whole ethic of the work and she would not edit a man's words to punish another man, however tempting the evening had made it.
Preston received his own guests' pleasure in translation from the waitress he had insulted, and the dining room, which had been pretending not to listen, exhaled in a way that moved the candle flames all along the window tables.
He tried a different angle then, suggesting the conversation might have been arranged, that for all he knew the investors were being kind, playing along out of politeness to spare the staff embarrassment in a nice restaurant.
The suggestion insulted Wei Zhang in his own right far more than it insulted Amara, implying his judgment was a courtesy rather than a faculty, and his reply, when it came, was delivered in English so that there would be no misunderstanding anywhere in the room.
He said that he had conducted business in Mandarin for forty years, that he knew fluency the way Preston presumably knew a sound warehouse from a hollow one, and that what they had all just heard was not politeness, it was education, of a standard he encountered in professional interpreters in Shanghai.
Liu Fang added, also in English, that Amara had corrected a contract term Chen Bo himself had used loosely earlier in the evening, and that she had done it so gracefully he had thanked her before he realized he had been corrected.
Chen Bo confirmed this cheerfully, apparently delighted to have been improved by the experience, and said he intended to use her phrasing in the morning's meeting, if she had no objection, which she told him, smiling for the first time without restraint, she did not.
Preston looked around his own table for an ally and found the landscape changed, his guests aligned not against him in anger but away from him in judgment, which for a man of his temperament was the more frightening geography.
Daniel had come to stand, unobtrusively, at the end of the corner, not to intervene but to be present, and several guests at other tables had abandoned pretense entirely and were watching with the frank attention people reserve for history happening at conversational distance.
Amara stood quietly through the verdicts, because they were not hers to deliver, and she felt no triumph swelling in her, only a tired, steady relief, like a held breath finally permitted to leave a body that had been holding it politely for years.
Wei Zhang turned to her and asked, in Mandarin, one final question, whether she had ever considered returning to interpreting work, and she answered truthfully that life had taken her elsewhere for a time, and that she had not yet decided whether elsewhere was permanent.
He received that answer the way he had received everything, without pressing, and then he looked, with calm expectancy, across the table at Preston, and the whole room understood that the conversation portion of the evening had ended and the settlement portion had begun.
The candles burned, the rain kept its counsel against the glass, and Preston Caldwell, who had spoken more words that night than anyone in the restaurant, discovered that he could not immediately find the next one.
It was Chen Bo who spoke first, gently, in English, reminding the table of the terms as if reading back the minutes of a meeting, saying the wager had been one hundred thousand dollars for a genuine business conversation in Mandarin, judged by the guests themselves.
He said it without gloating, which made it unanswerable, because gloating can be dismissed as taste, but a plain recitation of facts at a dinner table has the finality of a signature.