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Mac had booked the table for nine that evening. Stella and Hagen arrived at the restaurant in Rutledge Hill right on time to find that she was running late, and the table wouldn’t be ready for at least another ten minutes.

They took seats at the bar. Hagen examined the drinks menu while Stella surveyed the venue.

The restaurant was fancy but not stuffy. Tables weren’t hidden under white tablecloths, and there were no candles burning behind romantic red glass intended to produce intimacy. But the napkins were made of cloth not paper. Menus were hidden in leather folders, and the wine list ran for several pages and included varietals Stella had never drunk from countries she didn’t know produced wine.

Nothing here was like the places she and Mac visited when they’d first spent evenings together in Nashville.

In those weeks, they’d drunk cocktails in dive bars just dark enough to give couples at the next table the privacy they needed. They’d eaten in cafés and pizza parlors. The fanciest place they’d visited was a club owned by a friend of Stacy’s. They’d been there once for the opening and hadn’t returned. Too many unpleasant associations.

This place was serious and grown-up. And normal.

It was the kind of restaurant normal couples with normal friends frequented.

At one table, two middle-aged couples dug into their shrimp and quail and swordfish and some pasta dish. The men were well-dressed in button-down shirts and neatly trimmed beards. The women wore ironed blouses and had coiffures that had to have cost large sums of money and taken a serious chunk of time out of their day.

Servers passed between the tables in black pants and white shirts. They held wine bottles from the bottom, wiped the rim before they poured, and ensured glasses remained filled throughout the meal. Everything was ordered and neat. All activity took place according to rules and norms that no one who booked a table in that restaurant would ever consider breaking.

The place was only twenty minutes from the bloody scene Stella left a couple of hours ago but a million miles away.

“I’m going to order a bourbon while we wait.” Hagen lowered the drinks menu. “You want your dirty martini?”

“Sure.”

Hagen called the bartender over and placed the order.

He looked so comfortable sitting there at that bar. He’d picked out a silk shirt, dark blue, and wore it with the top two buttons left open despite the cold outside. A sharp crease ran down the legs of his pants, and he’d even changed his shoes. His Italian leather Oxfords gleamed as he perched them on the brass rail.

In this palace of a restaurant, he fit in so naturally and looked gorgeous. If Stella hadn’t known him, if she’d been sitting at that bar when he’d walked in, she wouldn’t have been able to take her eyes off him. She might’ve assumed that someone who took that much care in his appearance spent too long in front of a mirror. But the time had been well spent.

She tugged at the front of her knit dress. A thread had come loose on her hip, leaving a small hole in the wool. She tried to push it back and hoped Hagen wouldn’t notice.

Their drinks arrived. Hagen lifted his glass. The ice clinked. He sipped. She raised hers, and he looked into her eyes.

“You really are beautiful.”

It was just what she needed to hear.

Whatever doubts she’d harbored as they’d sat at that bar melted. She might not have fit into that restaurant the way Hagen did, but she fit with Hagen, and that was all that mattered.

Her hand on his thigh, she leaned across the gap between the barstools and kissed him. The ice that had touched his lip was cold on hers, but the taste of bourbon warmed her.

“So sorry we’re late.” Mac’s voice came from behind them. “I see you’ve started on the drinks. That’s cheating.”

Mac was still tugging at the belt of her coat. She greeted Stella with a hug, though only a few hours had passed since they’d last seen each other.

“And this is Werner.” She turned to the man beside her. “Werner, this is Stella and Hagen.”

Werner’s handshake was firm without being overly hard.

Stella liked what she saw.

Mac’s boyfriend was tall and slim, with a friendly smile and two curtains of dark hair that flopped over his forehead. His jacket was tweed and a long way from being new. Another year, and Werner’d be ready to sew on the elbow patches that the jacket seemed to demand.

As Hagen released his hand, the bartender informed them their table was ready. Stella and Hagen carried their drinks through.

Mac took Werner’s arm as they walked. He touched her hand briefly, the kind of move that happened without thought. Less than a month they’d been together, little more than two weeks, and already they were developing an intimacy that Stella and Hagen had taken months to understand. There was trust there, and openness.

Stella hoped Mac was right to hand over that trust so fast.

They sat and opened the menus. Starters included glazed pig’s ears, foie gras with fresh-baked sourdough, and steak tartare. Stella tried not to grimace as she flipped through the pages, searching for something with a cheese she recognized.

After a minute, Hagen folded his menu and laid it aside. No matter how complex the offers, he could always find something. And assume everyone else could too.

“So, Werner, you’re an anthropology professor.”

Werner cleared his throat. “Hoping to be, with a particular focus on archaeology. Though I’m still finishing my PhD, so I’m not technically a professor yet. I do, however, have the pleasure of boring undergraduates to death with my lectures.”

“You won’t be boring them.” Mac squinted at the menu. “This is weird stuff, isn’t it? Don’t they have a tomato soup? You can just tell everyone about those knives and arrowheads and things they found at Link Farm. I didn’t know anything about it.”

Werner smiled uneasily. Stella had the sense that he’d told people about the knives and arrowheads they found at Link Farm before and seen eyes glaze over.

The server arrived, and they placed their order. Hagen opted for the pig ears to start, and Werner chose the beef tartare. Mac’s careful questioning uncovered the possibility of an off- menu French onion soup, and Stella joined her. She opted for fish for the main course. It looked like the safest choice.

Hagen collected the menus and handed them to the grateful server. “It’s kind of ironic, no? You focus on old cutting technology, Werner, while Mac has to stay on the cutting edge of technology.”

Werner grinned. He had a bright, toothy smile that transformed his face instantly from serious academic to warm student, full of life and fun and playfulness. It took half a decade from his features and brought a glow to Mac’s face too.

“I guess we complement each other. And one day, some archeologist will dig Mac’s phone out of a mound and marvel at the primitiveness of even her workplace’s technology.”

Mac smiled at the server as she placed the soup down. “I marvel at the primitiveness of my workplace’s technology every time I turn on the printer. You’d be amazed at how behind the Bureau can be.”

Stella smiled and examined her own soup. A hunk of bread floated in the middle of the bowl. The cheese on top was decorated with strange blue lines. She prodded the floater with her spoon.

“We owe you thanks, Werner. That expert you found us, Guy Lacross, was really helpful. Just had to contact him again.”

Werner dug into his beef tartare. He looked comfortable eating raw meat.

“Mac mentioned you’d have to do that. That’s remarkable. I imagine seeing cuneiform in a crime scene once is bizarre enough. But twice?”

Hagen nodded. His pig’s ear was hidden in a lettuce wrap so that it looked nothing like an ear. Stella was glad.

“Surprised us too.”

“Is there anything you can tell me about the typography? Are you sure it’s from the same tablet? Or even the same era?”

Hagen glanced at Stella. He shrugged. “No idea.”

“You know, cuneiform was used by different civilizations. Akkadian, Sumerian, even Hittite. It’s really quite remarkable. Hieroglyphs get all the attention. But they were only used by the Egyptians. Cuneiform, which is less well known, spread across entire civilizations.”

Stella thought back to the bloody marks on the walls, something she’d rather not be doing while eating. “Well, without looking at the images side by side, I think they looked the same.”

“Really? In what way?”

Stella wasn’t sure how to describe the patterns of blood on the walls of Otto Walker’s apartment and those they found in Claymore Township. She wasn’t even sure if the comparisons were relevant. The forensic document examiner might tell them someone was bad at copying. Either way, again, it wasn’t the most appetizing dinner conversation.

“It’s hard to say exactly. It’s almost as if it was the same symbols but with different handwriting.” Stella sipped her soup. It was better than she expected. She tried not to think about the blue lines, but they added a welcome sharpness to the onion’s sweetness. “Is this stuff not your field too?”

Werner shook his head. A curtain of hair fell in front of one eye. He flicked it away. “Much too old for me. The stuff I excavate is no more than a thousand years old.”

“Practically yesterday.” Mac pushed her empty soup bowl to the side. Her appetite hadn’t changed since Stella had been away.

“Actually, the best place to excavate, if you will, is only about a hundred and fifty years old. There’s stuff in the basement of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and the other great museums of the world, that no one remembers is even there. There’s a whole horde of ancient material that we have in collections around the world that have not even been translated yet. You could write an entire doctorate on this.”

Stella mentioned, regretfully, that she’d never visited The Met, and Werner recommended the best works to see and explained how to avoid the lines. The conversation moved on.

The main course was both tastier and stranger than Stella had expected, and the rest of their dinner topic revolved mainly around the cuisine.

Guilt settled into her chest as they pulled out of the parking lot.

The conversation and the evening had been too smooth and comfortable. Too normal and enjoyable. She wasn’t sure they should be able to live that easily after all the things they’d seen that day.

And all the things they’d face tomorrow.