Then Bradley put down his spoon.
"Chairman Lin," he said, in English. He did not look at Amara. He looked down the table at Lin. "Before we go any further, I'd like to apologize. To you, for what you saw when you arrived." He stopped. He seemed to be choosing words, and finding them heavier than he expected. "But mostly to Ms. Adeyemi. The apology is really for her. I just..." He stopped again. "I'd like to say it in front of you both, because I think it ought to be said in front of everyone who saw it."
He turned in his chair to face Amara.
"I'm sorry," he said. "I looked at you and decided I knew who you were, and I was wrong, and I was rude, and I made a fool of you in front of people, and you didn't deserve any of it." He took a breath. "And I'm aware that I need this deal more than I've ever needed anything in my life, so any apology I make at this table is going to look like I'm only making it because of him. I can't fix that. Maybe it's even true. I honestly don't know." He looked back at Lin. "You may be right to think so."
There was a pause.
The rules of the room, Grace's rules and the rules of every interpreted meeting Amara had ever studied, were simple. Everything said at the table was rendered into both languages, whether or not the other side appeared to understand it. Lin understood English perfectly; that was clear now to everyone. But the meeting had a shape, and the shape was the protection, and so Amara turned to Lin and rendered the apology into Mandarin, completely, word for word, the stumbles included, the parts that were about her included, in exactly the same flat working voice in which she had told Bradley Kincaid twenty minutes earlier what she had said to him in Chinese.
It was, she would think later, one of the strangest things she had ever done. To carry an apology addressed to herself across a table to someone else.
Lin listened to the end. Then he spoke to Zhou Jian in Mandarin, a single short sentence, and Zhou Jian turned to Bradley and rendered it into English.
"The Chairman says that is the first thing you have said today that he believes."
Bradley absorbed this. "Is that good?" he asked.
Lin answered him in English himself, before Zhou could. "It's a start," he said.
* * *
The second course was a whole black cod, roasted with a miso glaze until the skin had gone dark and lacquered and blistered at the edges, laid out on a long white platter on a bed of charred leeks. Rosie and Kenji carried it down the lemon-tree path between them like a ceremonial object. Huang Bo saw it coming and actually put down his wine glass and said something that made the young lawyer Deng Kai laugh for the first time all day.
Mei came out behind them.
She had taken off her cap. She was wearing a clean white chef's jacket, buttoned to the neck, and she had a long thin knife in one hand and a folded cloth over her arm. She did not usually come out of the kitchen. Teddy, standing at the edge of the gravel clearing with Amara's apron still folded in his hands, watched her go by with an expression of mild alarm.
She carved the fish at the table herself, standing between Huang Bo and Lin, lifting the flesh away from the bone in thick clean white flakes with the tip of the knife. As she worked she said something to Lin in Mandarin, in a strong Sichuan accent, a short dry remark about the fish having been caught by a man in Half Moon Bay who also, unfortunately, sang, and about how she personally found that the fish always tasted better when the fisherman was a worse singer, and that this one must have been very bad indeed. Lin laughed out loud, the second time that afternoon.
Mei served Lin first, as was proper. Then the others in order down the Huaxin side. Then Bradley. And then she came to Amara, and she lifted with the tip of her knife the best piece on the whole platter, the soft fatty piece from just behind the head, the cheek, which in her grandmother's house had always gone to whoever had done the most that day, and laid it on Amara's plate without a word.
As she straightened up she put her hand on Amara's shoulder, very briefly, and pressed once. Then she picked up her platter and her knife and walked back down the lemon-tree path to the kitchen without looking back.
The lunch began, after that, to become a lunch.
It happened slowly, the way ice begins to move on a river. People talked. They talked about families, because Grace's notes had been right about that and because it turned out to be easier than anything else. Bradley talked, haltingly at first and then more easily, about his ex-wife, who lived in Marin and had remarried a pediatric dentist with whom, he admitted, he could find no fault whatsoever, which was its own kind of torment. He talked about his daughter, who was nineteen and at the University of Michigan studying environmental engineering, and who had texted him at seven that morning, without knowing anything about any of this, good luck today dad, don't be an idiot. He talked about his father, who was in a nursing home in Sacramento and who some days knew him and some days did not, and who, on the days he did not, was much friendlier.
Lin talked about his mother. She had sold dried fish, he said, for thirty years at a stall in the market on Fuhua Road. She had raised him at that stall. She was four foot ten and had never been to school and was not afraid of any human being alive. Once, in 1992, a deputy mayor of Shenzhen had come through the market on an official tour, with photographers, and had made the mistake of picking up a piece of her dried cuttlefish to admire it and then putting it back down in the wrong pile. Lin's mother had made him apologize. Publicly. To her face. In front of the photographers. The deputy mayor had apologized. The photograph had appeared in the Shenzhen Special Zone Daily the next morning.