Chapter 13: Three Kinds of Watching, None of Them Innocent

The silence held for a long time.

It was Margaret who moved first, which surprised no one. She picked up the notes the man had left — lifting them from the counter with the flat, deliberate gesture of someone handling something they have not yet decided the nature of — and set them in the till drawer and closed it with a sound like a period at the end of a sentence. Then she ran water over her hands. Not washed them. Ran water over them, cold from the tap, for a few seconds longer than necessary, and dried them on the cloth tucked into her apron, and turned back to the room.

"Right," she said, to nothing in particular. Then she moved to the far end of the counter and began arranging cups that did not need arranging, and the deliberateness of this, the precision of her not-looking-at-them, was its own kind of speech.