Chapter 15
Chapter 15: The Morning After
She woke first.
Seven-twenty-two, by her phone on the nightstand. Late, for her. She lay still for a moment in the September morning and considered the shape of the room — different from Thursday night, different from five years ago. His hotel room this time, not hers. The waterfront visible through the half-open curtain, the lake in flat grey morning light, a pleasure boat moving slowly across the middle distance.
He was asleep beside her.
She watched him for a moment with the permission she hadn't given herself in five years and was giving herself now. The brown hair doing something in the morning, which she remembered him saying it did. The slight roughness of a night's sleep on his jaw. The quality of someone who slept properly — deeply, without apology, the kind that said he'd earned it.
She had, she thought, been carrying something heavy for a long time. The specific weight of unresolved anger, which was not clean anger — clean anger spent itself and went — but the sticky kind, the kind attached to something that had mattered too much to dismiss and been too painful to examine. She'd made two games out of it. She'd built a whole studio out of the discipline of not looking at what she was actually making.
She felt, this morning, considerably lighter.
She picked up her phone. She had two texts from Priya — one at eleven-thirty last night (don't stay out too late ;)) and one from seven-oh-eight this morning (I'm getting breakfast downstairs if you want to not tell me anything over eggs). She sent back a laughing face and: Give me an hour.
Priya's reply was immediate: I'm giving you nothing of the sort. Take the whole morning. I'll be at the CN Tower.
She set the phone down and looked at the ceiling.
He stirred.
She heard it — the particular shift of someone surfacing from sleep — and she waited, because the dynamic of this morning was different from the last one. There was no flight. There was no note. There was nothing that needed managing, no early departure, no practical shape that required him to leave before she was ready to watch him go.
He opened his eyes.
He looked at her. She looked at him.
"Hi," he said.
"Hi," she said.
"You're here," he said.
"I'm here."
He looked at her for a moment with the expression that had been happening to her all week — the warmth and the fullness of it, the specific regard of someone who was genuinely pleased by what they found when they woke up. Then something moved in it: the memory of a different morning, a different absence, everything that had come from it.
"I was going to say I'm glad you didn't leave," he said, "and then I realised that's—"
"A lot," she said.
"Yes." He was quiet. "I'm glad you're here. That's simpler."
"I'm glad too," she said.
This was, for Nisha Kapoor, approximately the most direct thing she had said in five years about this or anything adjacent to it, and she noted that it did not feel as difficult as she'd been telling herself it would.
He made coffee from the hotel machine, which was the kind of machine that made coffee in the approximate sense of hot caffeinated liquid rather than anything Nisha would choose at a coffee shop, but which was sufficient for the purposes of seven-thirty in the morning after a night that had gone to nearly one.
He handed her a cup and sat on the edge of the bed across from where she'd settled with her back against the headboard, and they drank the coffee in the September light and said nothing for a few minutes, which was — she noted — comfortable. Not the silence of two people who didn't know what to say. The silence of two people who were in the same place about where they were.
"I want to ask you something," he said.
"Ask."
"Before we get to the practical conversation—" He paused. "Was there — did you have—" He stopped, in the way of someone who had already drafted this sentence and was dissatisfied with every version of it. "In five years. Was there anyone?"
She looked at her coffee. She thought about the question and what was actually in it.
"A few," she said. "Nothing that lasted. Nothing that—" She paused. "Nothing that required much of me." She looked at him. "You?"
"One," he said. "For about eight months. She was good. She figured out, before I was willing to admit it, that I was—" He paused. "That I was somewhere else. She was kind about it. It still wasn't fair to her."
Nisha held this. She thought about somewhere else and the eight months and the someone who deserved better, and she thought about her own versions of the same — the men who had come and gone, pleasant enough, none of them requiring her to be anything she wasn't, none of them asking for the parts of her she'd been keeping at a distance.
"I understand," she said.
"I know you do," he said.
"This was—" She tried to find the word. "I wasn't waiting for you. I want to be clear about that. I didn't spend five years waiting. I built things. I had a life."
"I know."
"But I also—" She looked at the window. "I also didn't let anyone get to the thing." She turned her coffee cup in her hands. "The game helped. Signal, specifically. Building it and understanding what I was building. I needed to — say it somehow. Even if the only way I could say it was—" She gestured at the invisible game, the mechanic, the missing digit. "That."
"I played it twice last month," he said. "The second time I understood the missing digit."
She looked at him. "When?"
"Four weeks ago. Two in the morning. I was — I was working and it was late and I played it again, and when I got to the message mechanic I sat with it and I thought: that's specific. That's not just a mechanic. And I—" He paused. "I went to bed and I thought about the number and one digit being wrong and I—" He stopped. "I almost looked up your email then."
"You had my professional email."
"I know."
"From the TIGF shortlist notification."
"I know," he said. "I had it for six weeks before the convention. I opened the email three times." He looked at her. "I wanted to do it right. I wanted to see you and say it properly, not in an email."
She looked at him. She thought about six weeks of her own preparation — the booth display she'd iterated seventeen times, the jacket she'd bought specifically, the way she'd walked the convention floor and told herself she was assessing the space.
"We both wanted to do it right," she said.
"Yes."
"And instead we did it over amaro in a hotel bar."
"Which was right," he said.
"Which was right," she agreed.
He showered. She borrowed his toothbrush, which he produced from a toiletry bag with the ease of a man who'd been sharing hotel rooms at conferences for ten years and had figured out the practical minimum requirements. She stood in front of the bathroom mirror and looked at herself for a moment — not critically, just looking. She had the quality of someone who had put down something they'd been carrying for a long time, and the specific lightness of that was visible. She looked like herself, but better rested than she had any right to be on six hours in a convention hotel.
She thought about the practical conversation. The one she'd asked him to table until morning. The one he'd been apparently planning since March with the specific quiet thoroughness of a person who had decided something and was working out how to say it.
She was ready for it. She thought she was ready for it.
He came out of the bathroom looking the same as he always looked — the hair in the morning, the easy warmth, slightly overdressed for the hour in the shirt he'd worn the night before. He looked at her.
"Breakfast?" he said.
"Priya is downstairs. She'll—" Nisha stopped. "Actually. Priya would want to meet you."
Something moved in his expression — the specific alert quality of a person who has registered the weight of that sentence. She would want to meet you. Not she's here and you'll cross paths. The other kind.
"I'd like to meet Priya," he said.
"She's going to be—" Nisha tried to find the word. "Extremely pleased with herself. In a way she'll try to disguise as normal social warmth."
"I can handle that," he said.
"She's been saying the story didn't add up for five years."
"I like her already," he said.
Nisha almost smiled. She picked up her jacket from the chair and looked at him — standing in the morning light of a hotel room in Toronto on the day after the convention, with the lake visible through the window and the particular quality of a Saturday morning that had nothing pressing in it.
"Come on," she said. "Before she texts me again."
"And after breakfast," he said, "we have a practical conversation."
"After breakfast," she agreed. "We have a practical conversation."
He held the door for her. She walked through it.
The corridor was quiet. The elevator was slow, as it had been all week. They stood in it side by side and she was aware of him the same way she'd been aware of him since Wednesday — at the specific, clear resolution of someone who had stopped managing the awareness and was simply letting it be what it was.
The lobby was bright with September morning light, the convention centre across the street already dismantling itself, the last traces of the TIGF week beginning to fold away. At a table near the window, Priya sat with a coffee and her phone, and she looked up as Nisha came through from the elevators.
She saw them both.
She put her phone face down on the table and arranged her face into an expression of completely neutral social pleasantness that was not fooling anyone.
Nisha crossed the lobby.
"Priya," she said. "This is Jamie."
Priya extended her hand. "Jamie Calloway," she said, with the tone of someone meeting a person they've had an opinion about for five years and are deciding whether the opinion was correct. "Bright Fault Games."
"Priya Nair," he said. "I've heard a lot about you."
"All good, I hope."
"You told her the story didn't add up," he said. "For five years. You were right."
Priya looked at him. She looked at Nisha. She looked back at him. She put her coffee down.
"I know," she said. "Sit down." She gestured at the chairs across from her with the authority of someone who had earned this. "I'll get someone to bring more coffee. And then you're going to tell me everything."