I walked into the steakhouse knowing I was late. The plates were already cleared. My parents were not celebrating; they were waiting for their solution to arrive. Mom gave that sweet, demanding smile, and my sister did not look up from her phone. Then the server dropped the check at my empty seat. My father told me to take care of it. I realized this was not a dinner; it was a test. And tonight, I was going to fail it on purpose.
My name is Natalie Bennett, and usually, when I walk into a room, I assess the risks. It is a habit I picked up from my job at Brightwell Dynamics, where a single overlooked variable can collapse a security network. But tonight, walking into the Argent Room in downtown Dallas, I did not need a risk assessment algorithm to know I was walking into a trap. I was the variable, and the collapse had already been scheduled. The air in the restaurant smelled of aged beef, truffle oil, and old money. It was the kind of place where the lighting was kept intentionally low, likely to hide the prices on the menu or the cosmetic work on the patrons. I navigated through the maze of mahogany tables, my heels sinking slightly into the plush carpet. I checked my watch. I was twenty minutes late. I had done that on purpose, driving three laps around the block, hoping that by the time I arrived, they might have at least looked at the bill themselves.
I was wrong. I spotted them in a semi-private booth near the back. The scene was almost artistic in its composition. My father, Raymond, was leaning back against the leather banquette, his hands folded over his stomach, looking satisfied. My mother, Lorie, was swirling the last half-inch of a dark red wine in her glass, her eyes scanning the room with a relaxed, benevolent gaze. Madison, my younger sister, was bathed in the artificial glow of her smartphone, completely detached from the physical world. But the detail that stopped me cold, the data point that mattered, was the table surface itself. It was clear. The dinner plates were gone. The bread baskets were empty. Even the dessert spoons had been cleared away. They had not just finished eating; they had been finished long enough for the staff to reset the stage. They were not celebrating their thirty-fifth anniversary anymore. They were waiting for their solution to arrive.
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