Julian led me back through the silent restaurant to his office, a cramped windowless room behind the kitchen that I had only ever been in to pick up my schedule, and he cleared a space on his cluttered desk and gestured for me to set the binder down and open it.

My hands were not quite steady as I lifted the cover.

I did not know what I was expecting, but it was not what I found.

Inside was not the messy personal detritus of two diners who had skipped out on a check.

Inside was something organized, professional, and deeply strange.

There were photographs, for one, high-resolution ones, printed on good paper, the kind that come out of a serious camera and not a phone.

There were documents, dense with legal language, formatted the way official papers are formatted, with numbered paragraphs and letterhead.