Chapter 13
Chapter 13: Wrong Number
The ceremony was beautiful in the way that things are beautiful when the people inside them care about them.
The main hall had been transformed — the booths cleared, the lighting warm, round tables and a stage and the particular hum of an industry that was, tonight, celebrating itself. Nisha had been to three TIGF ceremonies now, had been nominated twice, knew most of the people in the room at least by name. She sat at the Still Water Games table with Priya on her left and two other developers she'd known for years on her right, and she ate the dinner and laughed at the right moments in the host's set and applauded for the categories that came before the final one.
She was aware, at a specific resolution that she was choosing not to examine, of exactly where the Bright Fault Games table was.
Table nine. She was at table six. He was three tables away and she had her back mostly turned toward him, which was not an accident but was not something she was going to explain to anyone.
Priya was watching everything with the cheerful alertness of someone at a sporting event where she had an emotional stake in the outcome but could enjoy herself regardless of who won.
The categories moved. The host was good — someone who made mobile games with a sideline in dry convention comedy — and the room was warm and the wine was decent and Nisha found, to her own mild surprise, that she was genuinely present in it. She was here. She had built two games that people cared about. She was sitting in a room full of people she respected, at a table with her best friend, wearing a jacket she'd paid too much for and did not regret.
Whatever happened tonight — at the ceremony, after it — she was here.
The Best Indie Game category came last.
The host said the names: Signal, Still Water Games. Applause. Undertow, Bright Fault Games. More applause. Brief clips from both games on the screen behind the stage — Signal's opening sequence, the city splitting into two paths, the woman at the hinge point. Undertow's coastal town in tidal change, the water coming in, the figures moving through it.
Nisha watched the Undertow clip. She thought: it's good. It's very good. She thought: he was right about the second act. She thought about the movement system and the way you felt submerged even on dry ground, and she thought about a man in an airport thinking about a coastal town because he needed somewhere to put the thing he was carrying.
The host opened the envelope.
"And the Toronto Indie Games Festival Award for Best Indie Game goes to—"
She went very still. She was a practical person. She had prepared herself for both outcomes. She had told herself, genuinely, that either was fine.
"—Undertow. Bright Fault Games."
The room applauded. She applauded. It was genuine — she felt it, clean and real, the honest recognition that the work deserved it. Priya squeezed her arm and she looked at Priya and smiled, and the smile was real too.
She watched Jamie cross the room to the stage.
He thanked his team. Connor. Marcus, briefly, to laughter from the room — apparently the landscape architect pivot was a known story. He talked about what the game was for — the looking, the not giving up, the specific act of going back to a place and finding something new each time. He said: "I think the best games are the ones that know something real about being human. I hope this one knows something real."
He found her in the room.
It was not an obvious thing — she wasn't sure anyone else would have caught it. But he looked in her direction at the end of the speech, for just a moment, and she looked back, and the room was between them and full of sound and it was still exactly as legible as the two seconds across the auditorium had been on Wednesday.
He stepped off the stage.
After, she found him in the reception crowd.
She had not planned this. She had planned: give him the space to receive congratulations, let the evening settle, find him later in the hotel bar. But she moved through the crowd and he was there, at the edge of it, accepting the handshake from the host, and their eyes met and the crowd adjusted, and then she was in front of him.
"Congratulations," she said.
"Thank you." He looked at her. "Genuinely. Congratulations on Signal. The work is extraordinary."
"I know." She said it without false modesty, because the false kind would have been wrong. "Yours too."
They stood for a moment. Around them, the reception murmured — conversations, the clink of glasses, the warm noise of a community that had spent a week together. Connor was nearby, she registered. Priya was somewhere behind her. A careful, kind perimeter.
"I meant what I said," he said. "The looking, going back. I meant it specifically."
"I know," she said. "I understood."
"Nisha." He looked at her with the full attention she'd been aware of for five days, since the auditorium, since the bar, the long way back to a restaurant table in October five years ago. "I don't want to make tonight about—" He stopped. "What I'm about to say is not me making a moment out of tonight. Losing aside. If I'd lost, I was still going to say this."
"Okay," she said.
"I've been back to this city four times," he said. "I played all your games. I made a game about going back to a place where someone used to be and I'm aware of what that means now." He paused. "I told myself the story where you wanted one night and it was easier than the other story. I told myself that for five years. And I should have tried harder to find out which one was true."
She looked at him.
"I didn't stop thinking about you," he said. "That's the whole sentence. I didn't stop."
She held this. She felt it the way you felt a thing you'd been waiting for without admitting you were waiting — the specific, disorienting quality of a thing arriving when you had told yourself it wouldn't, couldn't, wasn't still possible.
"I built the wrong digit into a game," she said.
"I know."
"I didn't admit I was doing it until the bar last night."
"I know."
"I've been angry at you for five years." She paused. "The anger was real. And it was the wrong shape." She looked at him. "A note and a digit. That's the whole thing."
"Yes," he said.
She thought about the woman in the water at dawn. She stops. She lets it be the place.
She thought about the new game she was building. Something about finding someone new.
"There's a hotel bar," she said.
"I'm aware of it."
"I'd like a drink," she said. "With you. Not as a professional courtesy." She paused. "The other kind."
Something changed in his face — the warmth that had always been there becoming specific, focused, the full version of the expression she'd been trying not to register all week.
"Yes," he said. "I'd like that."
She looked at him for one more moment. Five years of carrying the wrong shape of something that had been right from the beginning, and here was the beginning again, offered again, in a different room in the same city.
"Come on," she said. "I'll buy you a congratulatory drink."
"And then?" he said.
"And then," she said, "we'll find out."