The chair was wooden.
Solid, practical, the kind of chair a bakery keeps for the one employee who earns a break — and Raven sat in it with his back straight and the borrowed towel across his lap and his elbows on the table, looking entirely at ease for a man who had fallen through a ceiling twenty minutes ago and was currently wearing nothing else.
The towel did not fully cooperate.
Jennifer had her back to him.
The coffee machine was the serious kind — not capsule, not drip, the kind with a portafilter and a steam wand and a specific technique, the kind that tells you something about the person who bought it and the life they'd built around small, controllable excellences.
She worked it without looking.
Her hands knew the sequence — grind, tamp, lock, pull — and her attention was therefore free to be elsewhere, which meant that the question she was assembling had been assembling for the last three minutes while her hands did the familiar work.
