Chapter 5: Donal Reyes and the Inconveniently Precise Question

The door opened at half past two, admitting a gust of November and a young man wearing a coat that had been adequate for October and was now engaged in an optimistic fiction about itself.

He stood in the doorway for a moment with the particular scanning quality of someone who has entered a room under the pretense of practicality and is actually looking for company, though he would not have admitted this, possibly not even to himself. His eyes moved across the café in one practiced sweep — the counter, the menu board, the two corners occupied by people who were not quite reading and not quite talking and somehow, despite this, visibly engaged in something — before he crossed to the counter and said, with the comfortable familiarity of a regular, "Margaret, please tell me someone's vacated the table near the plug point."

"Someone has," Margaret said, without turning around. "You're late. I was going to let Mrs. Adeyemi have it."