Chapter 11
Chapter 11: What She Remembers
They stayed in the bar for two hours.
This was not what she had planned. She had planned: one conversation, an hour, professional closure, move on. She had not planned to order a second drink, or a third, or to still be at the small table in the corner at seven-fifteen when the bar had grown louder around them and neither of them had noticed because they were talking.
He told her about the four years after Toronto. Not the full version — she had the full version of hers and assumed his; there were certain shapes that five years of carrying something left in a person and she could read the shape in him. He told her about Undertow, about the specific moment in the movement design when he'd understood what the game was about, about Connor's face when he played the first act prototype and didn't say anything for three minutes.
She told him about Signal. The parallel-timeline mechanic. The message with the missing digit.
"I didn't build it for the missing digit," she said. "I want to be clear about that."
"But."
"But it resolved when I built it. The thing I was making became clear." She turned her glass. "The second act had been stuck for months. The timeline mechanic worked structurally but it didn't mean anything. And then I built the malformed message and sat with it and thought: that's the game. That's what the whole thing is about."
"The messages that don't get through," he said, quoting her own panel answer back to her.
"Whether it changes what it meant to send them."
"Does it?" he said. It wasn't rhetorical. He was asking.
She thought about this for a long moment. She thought about the three texts to Brenda's number, the two calls, the voicemail she hadn't left. She thought about waking up to an empty room and the bare nightstand and the specific conclusion she'd drawn and held for five years.
"No," she said. "I don't think it changes what it meant."
He looked at her. The low bar light made his face look the way she remembered it from a different low light, five years ago, and she allowed herself to look at it properly for the first time since Wednesday. The warmth in it. The openness — still there, still constitutive, not a performance. The specific quality of a person who was looking at her with his full attention and not trying to manage what that meant.
This was, she thought, the thing about him that was the most difficult. Not the warmth in isolation. The warmth with the attention under it.
"Tell me what's coming after Signal," he said.
She told him. The sound engineer, the recording studio, the tapes with the voices from a different timeline. He listened with the completeness she remembered — the full-body listening, the questions that proved he'd heard. He asked about the structural conceit, the mechanics she was considering, the emotional problem at the centre of it.
"The problem at the centre of it," she said, "is the same as Watershed and Signal. Someone trying to reach someone who isn't there anymore."
"Is that the only kind of game you make?"
She looked at him. "Is it the only kind you make?"
He almost smiled. "Undertow is about someone you find in the end."
"Mine are too," she said. "Just not always in the expected direction."
"What does that mean?"
"Watershed — she finds her mother in the town. Not literally. In the water, the objects, the town she built. She finds the things her mother left." She paused. "Signal — the protagonist reaches herself. The version in the other timeline. They exchange messages and neither of them can change what happened but they know each other across it." She stopped. "That's still finding someone."
"Yes," he said. "I see that."
"My next one will probably be about finding someone new." She said it and watched herself saying it, the way you watched yourself do something and understood what you meant by it at the same moment.
He was very still.
"That sounds different," he said.
"It is."
"Good different?"
She looked at her drink. She thought about Priya: you've been carrying this for five years. She thought about: something that made you that angry, that fast, is information.
"Ask me after the awards," she said.
He held the look for a moment. Then he nodded, with the careful patience of someone deciding to hold a thing rather than press it.
"Okay," he said.
She went back to her room at eight.
She sat on the bed and looked at the ceiling and went through the previous two hours with the systematic inventory she applied to things that needed to be understood. The bar. The drinks. The conversation that had run twice as long as she'd planned.
The fact that she'd told him about the next game, the one she hadn't told Priya about yet.
She thought about the note on the nightstand. She had a very clear memory of that morning — the empty room, the bare surface, the absolute certainty of absence. She thought: it was there. It fell. He left it. And she thought about all the years she'd spent being angry at the clean version of the story, the one where he left without a word, the one that let her know exactly how to feel.
The version where it was a note and a digit was harder. The version where it was an accident, a small one, the kind that happened — the kind she'd built two entire games about — was harder because it meant five years of anger at the wrong thing, which meant the right thing was still there underneath it.
She thought about sitting across from him at the table in the bar and watching his face when he said you, partly. When she'd asked what Undertow was actually about.
She thought about the message mechanic in Signal and how she'd built it and sat with it and understood she was building something she hadn't admitted to building. She'd put it in the game anyway. She'd won a spot on the TIGF shortlist with it.
She had been making, for five years, games about things that didn't get through.
She picked up her phone. She texted Priya: I talked to him.
Priya replied in thirty seconds: And?
He left a note. It fell. Wrong digit in the phone number.
A long pause. Then: I TOLD YOU.
Then: Are you okay?
Nisha thought about this. "Okay" was not quite the word. "Complicated" was closer. "In the middle of something" was closer still.
Working on it, she typed. Come get coffee with me in the morning?
Obviously, Priya said. 7am. You're buying.
She did not sleep particularly well.
Not badly — she was not the kind of person who got insomnia over emotional complications, which she considered a professional asset. But she woke at two and lay in the dark for an hour thinking about things she didn't choose to think about, and when she eventually went back to sleep she dreamed about the Broadview room and the bridge light and the note she hadn't found.
In the dream the note was still on the nightstand. She kept reading it and not being able to see the handwriting.
She woke at six-thirty and lay in the specific clarity of early morning.
She thought: he waited forty minutes. She thought about a coffee shop on King Street she'd walked past a hundred times since, that she still went to on Saturdays sometimes, where there was a window table that got good morning light. She thought about him sitting there at six in the morning with a cortado and his phone, watching the door, for forty minutes, on an October Friday.
She thought about making Undertow in the year after and thinking: this is about a man looking for someone who left, and then: this is about a man who keeps going back to the same place.
She thought about four trips to Toronto and dinners at Ancora and walking past the Broadview.
She thought: the anger was real. And it was at the wrong thing.
She got up. She showered. She dressed with the same care as Tuesday, which surprised her — she had thought she'd be tired today, the last day of the convention, but instead she felt the sharp clear quality of a person at a decision.
She went to meet Priya for coffee.
Priya arrived at the hotel lobby café at seven-oh-three, which was early for Priya. She sat down across from Nisha, looked at her face, and said: "You didn't sleep."
"I slept some."
"Tell me all of it."
Nisha told her. The note. The digit. The two texts she'd never received. The forty minutes at the coffee shop. Priya listened with the focused attention she brought to everything important, not interrupting, her coffee going slightly cold while she listened.
When Nisha finished, Priya was quiet for a long moment.
"I knew it," she said. "I've been saying it for five years."
"I know."
"The story didn't add up."
"I know."
"And you were so sure—"
"Priya."
"I'm sorry. I'm not doing I told you so. I'm just — sitting with how avoidable this was." She looked at Nisha. "What are you going to do?"
"I don't know yet."
"Yes you do."
Nisha looked at her coffee. "The awards are tonight."
"They are."
"One of us wins and one of us doesn't. It might be weird."
"Nisha. Do you think Jamie Calloway is going to make it weird if he doesn't win?"
She thought about this honestly. "No," she said.
"No. Because he's—" Priya made a gesture. "Whatever he is. The kind of person who waits forty minutes." She paused. "You told me once — the morning after Toronto — that it was something. That it was the most surprising evening you'd had in years and that you were angry because it was something and he left anyway."
Nisha looked at the table.
"The leaving was an accident," Priya said. "The something was real."
"I know," Nisha said.
She did know. That was the specific difficulty of this Friday morning: she knew, with the clarity she brought to things when she was willing to look at them directly, that she had spent five years being angry at an accident and the thing underneath the anger had been there the whole time, waiting.
She picked up her coffee.
"Tonight," she said. "After the awards."
Priya looked at her. "Okay," she said. And then: "You're buying, by the way. I took the early train for this."