He ate the entire plate.This was notable because Yolanda had once confided to Elijah, in the comfortable shorthand they'd developed over several Friday mornings, that getting Alexander to finish a meal was a project. He eats like a man who has meetings scheduled around meals, she'd said, which was probably literally true. He tasted it. He ate what was required. He stopped when efficiency permitted.He didn't stop.Elijah watched this in his peripheral vision and said nothing, because he understood what it meant and because saying so would have done something to it, the way naming a thing sometimes collapsed it. He cleared his own plate, got up, began the washing-up with the quiet efficiency of someone who cleaned as a second nature, and let the silence of the kitchen settle back around them.He heard Alexander push back from the island."You could have been a chef," Alexander said.He turned. Alexander was standing, one hand on the back of the stool, and his expression was doing the
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