“I want them to hear the answer in this room first.”

Adrian’s expression changed when he heard the word board.

Victoria rested her hand on the stem of her glass but did not lift it.

The old man ended the call and turned toward Emily.

“You offered me a place at a table when the people who own every table here wanted me outside,” he said.

“Please stay until I can return the courtesy.”

Emily wanted to leave immediately, yet something in his voice made her set her coat back on the chair.

She had no idea that a blue door hidden behind the restaurant’s marble walls would soon become more important than the diamonds around Victoria’s neck.

Chapter 2: The Room Above the Old Theater

The Halcyon Room occupied the top floor of a Manhattan building that had once housed the Lantern Theater.

Emily knew that much from the brass plaque beside the elevator, but the restaurant’s glossy advertisements never mentioned what had happened to the theater before its conversion.

The staff had been trained to call the building an architectural landmark and avoid questions about the lower floors.

During her first week, a maintenance worker named Luis had shown Emily a sealed staircase near the linen closet.

“That goes nowhere now,” he said.

“The owners don’t like people asking about it.”

Emily had accepted his explanation because every old building in Manhattan seemed to possess a blocked door or two.

Now she noticed that the elderly stranger kept looking toward that very corridor.

Adrian asked two servers to mop the floor and told Emily to wait in the staff office.

The old man refused to let the manager separate them.

“I would prefer to remain where I am,” he said.

“Your dining room has excellent acoustics.”

Victoria laughed sharply.

“You have made quite a spectacle of yourself,” she told him.

“The spectacle began when you decided another person’s hunger was an insult to you,” he answered.

Her husband, Daniel Langford, pressed two fingers against the tablecloth and murmured something about keeping the evening private.

Victoria ignored him.

She was chair of the Halcyon Heritage Foundation, the organization whose invitations had filled the restaurant that night.

The occasion was a dinner celebrating the building’s restoration and a proposed museum exhibition about New York theater history.

Emily had carried champagne past portraits of actors whose names she did not recognize.

She had also heard Victoria boasting that the foundation had rescued the building from neglect.