Chapter 16
Chapter 16: The Awards
The practical conversation happened at noon, over the best coffee they'd found all week at a place on King Street that Nisha had been going to on Saturdays for five years.
Not Ancora. A few streets east. A corner spot with good windows and the particular quality of a Saturday morning cafe that understood itself: the long-term regulars who had their tables, the unhurried service, the ambient noise of a neighbourhood going about its weekend.
They had found a corner table. She had ordered the cortado she always had here and Jamie had ordered the same and looked out the window at King Street for a moment before saying: "I know this block."
She had looked at him.
"The coffee shop," he said. "That October."
She had looked at the block. She had thought: forty minutes. He sat here for forty minutes. She had thought: I ordered a coffee and sat at the window and watched King Street and I didn't know he'd been here.
"I know," she said. "I've been coming here for five years."
He had looked at her with the expression she'd stopped trying to manage. She looked back.
"I'm going to order a second cortado," she said, "and then we're going to have the practical conversation."
"I'm ready," he said.
He had a plan.
This was, she found, both predictable and something she hadn't quite been prepared for — not the having of it, but the specificity of it. He'd been thinking about it since March and the thinking had been thorough. Bright Fault Games had been partial-remote for two years. The remaining in-person infrastructure was in Vancouver but the work happened everywhere. Connor had been in Victoria for eighteen months. The third studio member was in Calgary now.
"What would moving look like," she said.
"Toronto?" He turned his cup. "I'd need six months, probably. To wind down the Vancouver apartment, figure out the studio infrastructure — whether we keep the shared space or go fully distributed. Connor would prefer fully distributed. I've been the holdout." He paused. "I think I was holding out for reasons that don't apply anymore."
"Reasons involving being near an airport," she said, "for a city you flew back to four times."
"Possibly."
She looked at him. She thought about what she was being asked to consider here and considered it honestly. He was asking nothing — he had said, explicitly, he was asking nothing tonight or this morning. He was telling her the practical shape of a thing that was possible, and she was deciding what to do with that.
"I don't need you to move here," she said.
"I know."
"I'm not—" She paused. "I'm not asking for a plan. I'm not asking you to rearrange your life for something that's—" She tried to find the word. "For something we don't know the shape of yet."
"I know that too." He looked at her. "I'm not presenting the plan as a proposal. I'm presenting it as — the thing I was thinking about, in the abstract, when I was trying to imagine what this could look like if the week went in a particular direction." He paused. "It did. I wanted you to know it wasn't abstract."
She held this. She thought about the first time he'd sat down at her table, the specific quality of a person who said what he meant and then demonstrated it. The note. The coffee shop. Four trips to Toronto.
He was consistent. That was the thing. Across five years of circumstances he'd had no reason to suspect would resolve, he had been — consistent. Not performing patience. Actually patient.
"You'd want to try this," she said. "Long distance, initially. Until we know what it is."
"Yes."
"Which means coming to Toronto."
"When I can. And you'd come to Vancouver sometimes, if you wanted. There are indie developers there you probably already know." He paused. "No pressure. I'm aware I'm asking for a thing that costs you something."
"You're not asking," she said. "You're describing a possibility."
"Yes." He looked at her. "The thing I'm asking for is simpler."
"What is it?"
"Try," he said. "That's it. Don't decide now that it's too complicated or too far or too risky. Just — try it. And I'll be worth it. I'm not saying that with any ego attached to it. I'm saying it because I know how to show up for things and I know what this is and I won't disappear." He paused. "Not accidentally. Not on purpose. Not at all."
She thought about the woman in the water at dawn. She stops. She lets it be the place.
She thought about the new game — the sound engineer, the studio, the voices across a divide. Something about finding someone new.
She thought about the parallel-timeline game she'd made and all the messages that hadn't gotten through, and the specific mechanic where you received the broken one — the digit missing, the sequence incomplete — and had to decide whether it was a mistake in the code or the point. And the answer, in the game, was: both. It's a mistake. And the message is still real.
She looked at him across the corner table at the coffee shop on King Street, the one she'd been coming to for five years on Saturday mornings, the one where he'd sat for forty minutes one October and she'd arrived twenty minutes after he'd left.
"Okay," she said.
He looked at her. "Okay?"
"Try," she said. "Yes. I'll try it." She held his look. "I'm not easy to be with. I should tell you that directly."
"I played your games," he said. "I have a very clear picture."
"And?"
"And it doesn't change anything." He picked up his coffee. "I'm not looking for easy. I'm looking for you."
She looked at her cortado. She thought: there it is. The whole sentence. The one that had been building since a wrong table at a restaurant in October five years ago, and she felt it settle into the place it had been headed the whole time.
"Start with next weekend," she said. "You could stay in Toronto. An extra week. After the convention." She paused. "Priya has already offered to show you the city, which — she'll say it's for your benefit but it's because she wants to spend more time deciding if she approves."
"I want her approval," he said, genuinely.
"I know. She knows too. That's the point of the exercise."
"Will she?"
Nisha thought about the lobby, Priya's perfectly composed neutral face, the fifteen-second assessment before she'd gestured at the chairs with the air of someone who had already decided. She thought about: Sit down. Tell me everything.
"She already does," she said. "She's just going to make you earn the official version."
He smiled — the full one, the one that changed the register of the whole face. She let herself look at it properly.
"I can do that," he said.
"Good," she said. She picked up her cortado. "Now. Are you going to eat something? I've been here for twenty minutes and you've only had coffee."
"I was talking."
"You can eat and talk."
"Can I? I wasn't sure what the rules were."
"The rules," she said, "are that you're staying in my city for an extra week and I'm going to feed you properly, and we're going to figure out the rest as we go."
He looked at her. "I can work with that," he said.
"Good," she said. "Welcome to Toronto. Again."
Connor's reaction, by text, was a single message: I knew it.
Followed, thirty seconds later, by: Tell her I said well done for surviving you for 5 years.
Followed, thirty seconds after that: That was a joke. Tell her welcome. I mean it.
Jamie showed Nisha the texts over lunch. She read them with the specific expression of someone who was not smiling and was.
"He's going to be insufferable," Jamie said.
"He sounds like Priya," Nisha said. "They'll probably get along terrifyingly well."
"That's — that's a concerning thought."
"I know." She handed his phone back. "Let's not think about it yet."
"Agreed," he said. "One thing at a time."
"One thing at a time," she agreed.
The King Street afternoon went on outside the window — the last of the TIGF crowd dispersing into the Saturday city, the neighbourhood resuming its ordinary shape, the specific quality of a day that was no longer part of a convention and was simply a day. Nisha looked at the street and thought about five years of Saturday cortados at this table and the version of the story she'd been carrying, and the version that had resolved in the past twenty-four hours, and the thing that came next.
The glitch, Priya had said. Call it a glitch and fix it.
She had. They had. Five years late and here it was: fixed.
She looked at Jamie across the table and thought: there you are. Still here. Finally here.
She thought: this is the beginning.