Chapter 12
Chapter 12: What He Says
The awards ceremony didn't start until seven.
By noon, Jamie had reconfigured the Undertow display for the last day, had answered his email, had done a short interview with a streaming channel that covered indie games, and had stood in the convention hall being present and professional and approximately fine in the way of someone whose body was doing the right things and whose mind was somewhere else entirely.
The bar conversation had been — a lot. He'd known there was going to be a conversation. He hadn't known what would happen in it, exactly, except that he owed her the full account and was going to give it, and she would do what she did with it, and he would handle that.
He had not been prepared for: the moment when the thing she'd built her whole second game around became legible. The message with the wrong digit. He'd played Signal six months ago and understood what it was about in a diffuse, this-means-something way, and then he'd sat across from her in a hotel bar and it had resolved like a lens focusing.
She had been building things that were about this. Not just this — he knew that, she was a real artist making real work — but this had been in it, the whole time. She'd built the wrong number into a game that the convention was about to recognise alongside his game about going back to a place where someone used to be.
He had a lot of feelings about this. He was keeping most of them at a professional distance until the end of the day.
Connor appeared at his elbow at twelve-thirty.
"Lunch," Connor said.
"I'm fine."
"I said lunch, not are you fine. Come on." He steered Jamie by the shoulder with the authority of a decade of friendship. "There's a place on the waterfront. I'm not eating a convention sandwich."
They ate. Connor debriefed on the bar conversation with the thoroughness of someone who had been emotionally invested in this outcome since Thursday five years ago. He made the right sympathetic sounds in the right places. He also, Jamie noticed, refrained from saying I told you so for approximately fifteen minutes before he said it once, quietly, and then moved on.
"So," Connor said. "Tonight. The awards, and then—"
"And then we'll see."
"You have things to say to her."
"I always had things to say to her. That's not the question."
"What is the question?"
Jamie looked at the waterfront. The lake was flat and grey under the September sky, the kind of afternoon that felt like the season making a final accounting before autumn. "The question is what she wants," he said. "I've been clear about what I want. I've been clear about it for five years in every direction except the one where she could hear it."
"So be clear in the direction she can hear."
"I'm working on the timing."
"After the awards," Connor said.
"Yes."
"Not before."
"Not before." He paused. "She should have tonight be about the work. Whatever happens. She should have that."
Connor looked at him with an expression that was not sentimental — Connor was not a sentimental person — but which had in it a specific kind of regard for a friend who had just said something that confirmed, again, the assessment Connor had been making for fifteen years.
"Okay," Connor said. "Good." He picked up his sandwich. "I'd also like to note, for the record, that both your games are brilliant and either of you winning is a reasonable outcome."
"I know."
"I also want Undertow to win, because I worked on it for two years and it has the best movement system we've ever built."
"I know that too."
"I'm comfortable holding both truths," Connor said.
He saw her at three.
She was in the last session she'd mentioned wanting to attend — a talk on player accessibility that he'd also wanted to see — and he'd arrived five minutes before it started and sat in the back row not entirely by accident. She was in the third row, taking notes in a notebook. He watched her from behind for an hour and tried to think about the panel content and mostly failed.
The session ended. People shuffled toward the doors. He thought about catching her in the lobby, then thought about: she said after the awards. Let it be after the awards. He started toward the side exit.
"Jamie."
He turned.
She was standing two rows back, notebook in hand. The afternoon light from the conference windows caught her face and she looked — not composed in the managed way she'd been managing all week. Clear. Like someone who had resolved something overnight.
"Hi," he said.
"Hi." She looked at him steadily. "I've been thinking about last night."
"So have I."
"I'm still—" She paused. She chose the honest word. "I'm still working out what I feel about it. The practical shape of it. Five years, and it was a note and a digit. I'm still—" She stopped again. "I want you to know that I understand. What happened."
"Okay," he said carefully.
"And I want you to know that the anger—" She looked at him. "The anger was real. And I'm setting it down. Not performing that I am. Actually doing it." She paused. "I'm telling you because you deserve to know."
He held this for a moment. He thought about all the ways he might respond and he thought about what she'd just done — the specific cost of saying that clearly, this woman who was not built for easy disclosure — and he said: "Thank you."
"Don't make it into a thing."
"I'm not making it into a thing. I'm just—" He stopped. "Thank you. That's all."
She nodded. She was still holding her notebook and she glanced down at it briefly — the small look of someone reorienting — and then back up at him.
"The session was good," she said.
"It was." He paused. "The part about reading difficulty as design information rather than failure state. That's been something I've been thinking about for the new project."
"What's the new project?"
"Something about—" He tried to summarise it in the way he was still working out. "Two people building the same thing from opposite directions. And the place where the blueprints converge."
She looked at him. Something moved in her expression.
"That sounds like it could be anything," she said.
"It is, right now. Early structure." He held her look. "The emotional core is still working itself out."
"That's how you know it's real," she said quietly. "When it takes a while to tell you what it's for."
"Yes," he said.
They stood in the emptying session room for a moment, people moving past them, the conference centre doing its last-day business around them.
"Tonight," she said. "After the ceremony."
"Yes," he said. "After."
She turned and walked toward the lobby, and he watched her go with the particular feeling of a person who has waited a long time for something and can feel the waiting nearing its end.
He called his sister at five.
She was two years younger than him and lived in Victoria with her partner and their dog, and she was the person Jamie called when he needed the kind of unvarnished truth that Connor delivered with too much comedy and his mother delivered with too much warmth. Fiona delivered it the way she'd delivered everything since she was seven years old: directly, with care, and without the buffer of any particular emotional management strategy.
He told her about the week. The convention, the panel, the bar conversation. She listened without interrupting, which she did for approximately four minutes before she said: "Oh my God."
"I know."
"Five years, Jamie. A note and a digit."
"I know."
"You've been—" She stopped. "You know that game you've been making? The one where the man keeps going back?"
"I've been told."
"Did she—"
"Her second game has a broken message mechanic where one digit is wrong."
Silence.
"Fiona."
"I'm sitting with this," she said. "Give me a second."
"It's—"
"I'm sitting with it." A pause. "Okay. You're going to see her tonight. After the awards."
"Yes."
"And you're going to tell her."
"Tell her what, specifically."
"That you've been a little bit in love with her for five years. That you played all her games. That you went back to Toronto four times. That you—"
"Fiona."
"You can frame it however you want. But you're going to say the real thing, not the version that gives you an exit."
"I don't want an exit," he said.
"I know you don't. That's why I'm telling you to say so." She paused. "She's been carrying this too, Jamie. Whatever she built into those games — she didn't do that because she was fine. She did that because she's the same person you are about this." Another pause. "Tell her. The whole thing. Let her decide what to do with it."
He looked out the hotel window. The September evening was coming on, the lake darkening, the convention centre across the street lit up for the ceremony.
"Okay," he said.
"And Jamie?"
"Yes?"
"I hope you win. But also — you know what matters more than winning."
"I do," he said.
"Good." She paused. "Call me tomorrow."
"I will."
"With the whole story."
"Yes," he said. "I'll call you with the whole story."