Lin took a card from the inside pocket of his jacket and held it out to her, with both hands, the proper way.
It was plain white. On one side, in English: Lin Weiguo. Chairman. Huaxin New Energy Co., Ltd. On the other, the same in Chinese. Below the printed text, on the Chinese side, someone had written a mobile phone number in blue ink, in small, careful numerals.
"That number," Lin said, "belongs to my wife, my two children, Dr. Fang, and, until she died, my mother. Now also to you." He waited until she had taken the card with both hands. "Call me when you finish your degree. Not for a job. I don't want to hire you. Huaxin has interpreters." He paused. "People like Mr. Kincaid decide, in a few seconds, who belongs in the rooms where important things happen. The world needs interpreters who can stand in those rooms and carry what is said across the table without dropping any of it. I think you could be one of the very best. If you'll let me, I'd like to help."
Amara held the card. She did not trust herself to say anything except "Thank you," so she said that, in Mandarin, and then again in Cantonese.
"One more thing," said Lin. "Would you write down the address of the noodle shop for me? On Hongli Road. I'll be in Shenzhen next month."
"It's closed," Amara said. "Since 2019. When she moved. I think it's a phone repair shop now. Or it was."
"I know," said Lin. "I'd like it anyway." He took a pen from his pocket and held it out. "I'd like to stand in front of it for a minute. And think about a woman with a cane."
* * *
When Amara came back through the ferns to the Long Table, almost everyone was gone.
Marcus and Owen were out in the parking lot, on their phones, rearranging the next morning so that the whole team could be in Fremont by seven. The busser with the rake had moved on to the front of the hall. At the far end of the table, Rosie and Kenji were clearing, quietly, stacking the heavy white plates and carrying them away down the lemon-tree path.
Bradley Kincaid was sitting alone in the oak chair at the head of the table. Lin's chair.
He had taken off his jacket and hung it on the back of the chair, and he sat in his white shirt with his elbows on the dark stone, leaning forward. In his hands he held the brick. He was turning it over, slowly, again and again, looking at it. The yellow paper band. The soft furred edges of the bills. The face of Benjamin Franklin on the top note, worn smooth by twenty years in his pocket. He was looking at it the way a man looks at something he has carried his whole life and has never actually seen before.
Amara stopped at the end of the table.
"Mr. Kincaid," she said.
He did not look up.
Then, after a while, he did.
He looked older than he had at noon. It was not anything she could have pointed to. His hair was the same and his face was the same. But something had gone out of it, some tension that had been holding everything up, and without it his face had settled into itself, gray and tired and very human, the face of a man who had been awake since 3:15 in the morning and had just found out something about himself that he would have preferred not to know.
He set the brick down on the stone in front of her. Gently, this time.
"Sit down," he said. "Please. Just for a minute. If you have a minute."
She sat, two chairs down, where Fang Lihua had been.
"A man named Frank Doyle gave me that," Bradley said, nodding at the money. "In a steakhouse in Dallas. A long time ago. He was a drunk and a genius and he got fired from more companies than I've ever worked for. He told me to carry it into every meeting I ever had. He said it would change the way I walked into a room. Change the way I talked." He looked at the yellow band. "He was right. It did. For twenty years I've walked into rooms like I could buy anything in them. Including the people." He paused. "I didn't even know I was doing it. I didn't hear it. Not until today. Not until I heard it hit the table."
Amara said nothing.
"When my wife and I signed the divorce papers," Bradley said, "eleven years ago, in a lawyer's office in San Rafael, she said something to me on the way out. She said, You never really see anybody, Brad. You only see what they can do for you." He shook his head slowly. "I was so angry I didn't speak to her for a year. I told everybody she was bitter. I told my daughter her mother was bitter." He looked up at Amara. "I looked at you this morning, and I saw somebody who couldn't do anything for me. That's all I saw. That's all I've ever seen. She was right. Eleven years, and she was right the whole time."
He took a breath.
"I'm sorry," he said. "I know I already said it at the table. I'm saying it again because he's gone now. Lin's gone. There's nobody here to perform it for. I'm not saying it to get anything. I'm saying it because it's true, and because I'm afraid if I don't say it now, while I still feel it, I'll talk myself out of it by tomorrow morning, and I'll never say it at all."
Amara was quiet for a long time.
She thought about Carl. She thought about a blond graduate student at Stanford in 1986 who had looked at a young man in a too-big suit and pointed to the cafeteria, and who now said Chairman Lin! Wonderful to see you! at conferences and had no idea. She thought about how many people in the world had looked at someone for a second and decided, and never once in their lives come back to the table and said what Bradley Kincaid had just said.