Chapter 10
Chapter 10: The Panel
Thursday moved like a held breath.
The convention was at its peak — the final full day before the awards ceremony Friday night, every panel overbooked, every booth at capacity, the shared energy of two thousand people who had found, for four days, the place where the things they made were taken seriously. Nisha had been at the morning developer roundtable and two afternoon sessions, had been at her booth for three solid hours, had talked about Signal until she could deliver the summary in her sleep.
She had not run into Jamie again.
This was statistically improbable at a convention this size, which meant at least one of them was managing the probability. She suspected it was both of them.
She saw him once — from across the main hall, near the Undertow booth, talking to a group of developers with the easy expansive quality she'd watched on the panel stage. He was using his hands when he talked. He'd always used his hands when he talked. She remembered this with the specific clarity of someone who had been paying attention five years ago and had no reason to still be paying attention now.
She looked away.
She went back to her booth and talked to a student from OCAD who had questions about Signal's sound design, and she was thoroughly present in that conversation, and she did not check the time.
Priya found her at six.
"You've been very dedicated to your booth," Priya said.
"That's the job."
"You walked past the main hall twice from the south entrance."
Nisha looked at her.
"I'm not doing anything with that information," Priya said. "I'm just observing."
"What I need," Nisha said, "is to eat something and drink something and talk about anything except—"
"Done," Priya said. "I found a Thai place two streets over that the developer from Montreal recommended. Come."
They went. The Thai place was good and loud and they ate properly for the first time since Tuesday and talked about the roundtable and Priya's work and the game that had won Best Narrative last year and whether the Montreal couple would win anything this year. Nisha ate pad see ew and drank an iced tea and felt, by the end of it, approximately like herself.
"Tell me about the panel," Priya said, on the way back. "The real version, not the professional recap."
"The real version is the same as the professional version."
"Nisha."
Nisha walked for a moment in silence. The September evening was warm — summer's last hold, the lakeshore breeze tempering it slightly. She thought about the auditorium and the two seconds across the room and the thing he'd said about the message mechanic.
"He played Signal," she said.
"I know. He said so on stage."
"He understood it." She paused. "Not just understood it — he got the specific thing it was trying to do. The message with the missing character. He said it was the whole game in that moment."
Priya was quiet.
"Which means he—" Nisha stopped. She thought about the game she'd made and the thing it was actually about and the fact that she had spent nine months building something she'd told herself was about parallel selves and had apparently been making obvious enough that a man who'd spent one night with her five years ago recognised it from a stage.
"He played your other ones too, didn't he," Priya said.
"I don't know."
"He played Watershed. He said so the first night."
"That was five years ago." Nisha walked. "People play games."
"People play games," Priya agreed, in the tone that meant she was choosing not to continue the sentence.
"He wants to have a conversation," Nisha said. "I told him Wednesday. After the setup."
"I know. You told me last night."
"I'm telling you again."
"Because you're going to talk yourself out of it between now and then."
Nisha didn't say anything.
"Don't," Priya said. "Whatever he has to say — let him say it. And whatever you have to say — say it back. You've been carrying this for five years in a shape that's been making everything else slightly harder than it needs to be." She paused. "I know you think it's fine. I know you believe that. But something that made you that angry, that fast, over someone you knew for four hours — that's not nothing, Nisha. That's information."
"I'm aware of what it's information about."
"Good. Then you're ahead of where most people would be."
They turned into the hotel. Priya said goodnight at the elevator and Nisha went to her room and sat on the bed for a while, and did not work on the design document, and thought about the message mechanic and the thing she'd built into it.
Friday was the awards ceremony setup.
It was also, by the convention schedule, the last day of open booths — the afternoon free for final demos, the evening reserved for the ceremony itself, which was at the main hall on the ground floor. Nisha spent the morning at her booth and the early afternoon at a session on player accessibility that she'd wanted to attend all week. The session was good. She was genuinely interested.
At four-thirty, she walked to the bar.
It was the hotel bar off the lobby — not the main restaurant, the smaller one with the low lighting and the cocktail list written on a chalkboard, the kind of bar that understood its purpose. She arrived first. She ordered water and a drink she then didn't touch and sat at the small table in the corner with her back to the wall, which was, she reflected, exactly as defensive as it looked.
She had been here exactly twice in her life: two years ago, for a different conference, sitting with the Montreal developers and two people from Vancouver she'd just met.
She did not examine whether that last part was relevant.
The bar had six other people in it, minding their own business. She looked at the chalkboard. She turned her water glass.
He arrived at four-forty. She heard him before she saw him — the exchange with the bartender, easy and brief. Then he found the table and he sat down across from her, and the thing she'd been managing since Wednesday morning became immediately, in this smaller space, harder to manage.
"Hi," he said.
"Hi," she said.
The bartender appeared. Jamie looked at the chalkboard and ordered something amber without making it a performance.
"How was your day?" he said.
"Professional," she said. "Busy. Good." She looked at him. "You?"
"Same." He paused. "The accessibility panel was interesting."
She looked up. "You were at that?"
"Sat in the back. You were in the third row."
"I didn't see you."
"I know." He said it without elaboration. Something about the admission — the specific quality of a person who has been aware of you and is honest about having been — made the managed surface slightly more difficult to maintain.
"Jamie," she said.
"Nisha," he said.
"You said you owed me an explanation."
"I did."
"So."
He looked at her. His drink had arrived and he hadn't touched it either, she noticed. They were both sitting at a table with untouched drinks and the specific charged quality of two people who have arrived at a thing and are not sure yet what to do with it.
"I'm going to ask you something first," he said. "And I want you to know it's not — it's not a deflection. I genuinely need to know before I say the rest."
She waited.
"Did you text me?" he said. "After. The morning after."
She looked at him. "Yes," she said.
Something moved in his face — relief and something else, something more complicated. "What number did you use?"
"The one you gave me at the bar."
"Which was—?"
She looked at him. "Yours."
"Nisha." He paused. "I texted you twice that morning. From my phone. You never got them?"
She went very still.
"I texted you at five forty-three," he said. "The coffee shop address. I said come if you can. And then again at six twenty-three. I was still there." He paused. "I waited forty minutes."
She was aware of her own breathing.
"There was a note," he said. "I left a note on the nightstand. With the coffee shop and my number. I—" He stopped. "Did you find it?"
"There was no note," she said.
He looked at her. She looked at him.
"It fell," she said slowly. "Or — it could have. The air from the door." She thought about the bare nightstand and the bare room and the specific brutal conclusion she had drawn from both. "I looked. There was nothing."
"I left one," he said. "I specifically—" He ran a hand through his hair, which she remembered, which she hated that she remembered. "And the number. When you texted — what happened?"
"It rang," she said. "And a woman named Brenda answered."
The silence lasted approximately five seconds.
"One digit," she said.
"One digit," he said, in the voice of a person who has just understood something he's been carrying for five years. "We typed it in the bar. We were — it was dark and we'd had—"
"I know." She looked at the table. She thought about the three texts she'd sent to not-him, and the phone calls, and the wall she'd hit. "I thought you'd—"
"I thought you'd decided," he said. "One night. That you didn't want—" He stopped. "I left. You didn't come to the coffee shop. You didn't text. I thought you'd chosen."
"And I thought you left without a word."
"I left you a note."
"I know that now." She looked up. He was watching her with the expression she'd been trying not to think about — the full attention, the weight in it. "I know."
They sat with this for a long moment. The bar murmured around them. Somewhere outside, the lakeshore conference centre was finishing its setup for the awards. The whole week pressing around the edges of this small table.
"Five years," she said.
"Yes," he said.
"Because a note fell and a number had the wrong digit."
"Yes."
She thought about Priya: the man left a note. People who ghost don't leave notes. She thought about: the story doesn't add up. She thought about nine months of building a game about messages that didn't get through and then going on stage and hearing him name the thing that was in it.
She thought: he played all of them. She hadn't asked. She knew.
"Did you play Signal before the TIGF shortlist," she said.
He looked at her. "Yes."
"When?"
"About six months ago."
"And Watershed?"
"The January after Toronto." A pause. "And again twice after that."
She looked at him. He didn't look away.
"You went back to Toronto," she said. "You mentioned that at the panel. Four times."
"Yes."
"Looking for—"
"I wasn't looking," he said. "Not exactly." He stopped. "Not specifically. I came for conferences and I — walked around the city. The same places."
"The Broadview," she said.
"Yes."
"And Ancora."
"Once. I had dinner." A pause. "The black cod. A Grüner Veltliner."
She looked at her drink. She felt something in her chest that was not quite the anger she'd been carrying and not quite its absence, but something between — the specific difficult feeling of a thing you've been holding for years and are slowly setting down.
"I was angry at you," she said. "For five years. That's—" She stopped. "That's not nothing."
"I know," he said. "You're allowed to be angry. Even now that you know why."
"I'm not—" She paused. "I'm working on what to be now."
"Take your time," he said.
She looked at him. He was sitting across from her in a hotel bar in Toronto on a Thursday evening, and the awards were tomorrow, and there were two days left in the week, and the note had fallen and the digit had been wrong and Priya had been right and Connor had apparently been right and five years of carrying something that could have been resolved by one more text, one more phone call, one more attempt that she'd been too proud and too hurt to make.
She was angry about this.
She was also — she was also something else, that had been there since Wednesday morning across the auditorium and was still there now, in this small bar, at this small table, with his hands on either side of his untouched drink.
"I want to hear the rest of it," she said. "The whole five years. All of it."
He looked at her. "Now?"
"Now," she said. "We have time."
He picked up his drink.
"Okay," he said. "Where do you want to start?"
"Tell me about Undertow," she said. "Tell me what it was actually about."
He was quiet for a moment, and she watched him decide to be honest.
"You," he said. "Partly. The feeling of going back to a place where someone used to be."
She held this. She let it mean what it meant.
"Tell me," she said. "All of it."