Chapter 18
Epilogue: Online
EPILOGUE
Online
Six Months Later
The new game had a title by February.
Found Signal — which Priya said was too on-the-nose and Jamie said was exactly right and Nisha said was what it was called, and that ended the discussion. She was in the late structural phase by then, the part where everything was provisional but in the right direction, the part she'd always found difficult and was finding, this time, considerably less so.
Something had changed in the working. She'd been trying to name it for weeks before she admitted, one Sunday morning over coffee in Jamie's inlet-view apartment in Vancouver, that she thought the working was better when someone was in the room.
He hadn't said anything. He had the particular expression of a person who was not going to say I told you so because it would spoil something.
"Shut up," she said.
"I didn't say anything."
"The face is saying things."
"The face is just a face." He turned back to his own screen, the Bright Fault project in early structure — the two-people-building-from-opposite-directions concept, which had developed over the winter into something both of them kept interrupting each other's workdays to talk about. "But you could stay in Vancouver for the rest of February, if you wanted."
"I have a studio in Toronto."
"You have a desk in Toronto. The studio is wherever your machine is."
She thought about this. She thought about Priya, who had visited Vancouver in January and delivered her final verdict on Jamie in the form of a text to Nisha that said: okay he's excellent, you can keep him. She thought about the Kensington Market apartment she'd had for three years, and the lease that was up in April, and the fact that she had spent three weeks of the last six months in Vancouver without finding any reason to be elsewhere.
She looked at the inlet from the window. It was February-grey, the mountains visible across the water, the specific quality of a Vancouver winter morning that was not Toronto.
"I need my second monitor," she said.
"I'll get you a second monitor."
She looked at him. He was looking at his screen with the expression of a man who was not managing his expression at all, which meant he was very carefully not showing what he was thinking, which meant she could read it exactly.
"I would need space of my own," she said.
"There's the second room," he said. "It has an east window."
"For working."
"For working," he agreed. "And I would need to visit Toronto regularly. I have the Priya relationship to maintain."
"She texts you more than she texts me now."
"We have a lot of opinions in common."
"It's very alarming," Nisha said.
She looked at the inlet again. She thought about the parallel-self game and the messages that crossed between timelines and the protagonist deciding whether to be found. She had written that ending months ago, before she was ready to understand what she was writing. The protagonist said yes. She let the voice through.
She thought: there are many versions of the story. There was the version where the note stayed on the nightstand and they'd woken up together in October five years ago and figured it out from there, which might have been good or might have been wrong, too fast, the wrong pressure. There was the version where they'd never been in the same convention together and spent another five years not-looking. There were versions where she'd looked him up and versions where he had, where one act of less pride had collapsed the whole interval.
And there was this version. The games they'd made. The five years of parallel work, the same thing from opposite directions. The TIGF shortlist. A bar. The conversation about the missing digit.
She thought: maybe the interval was the point. And then: that's what he said. And then: he was right and I'm not going to tell him more than once.
"April," she said.
He looked up.
"My lease is up in April," she said. "Priya has been after me to move somewhere with a kitchen that isn't thirty years old. I've been—" She paused. "Not looking."
He was very still.
"I'm not saying Vancouver permanently," she said. "I'm saying — I'm saying I don't know the shape of it yet. I want to try it for a season and see what it is." She looked at him steadily. "The east window."
He looked at her with the expression she'd stopped trying to manage and had started to simply receive as the specific, particular thing it was — the warmth and the fullness and the complete quality of someone who was here, present, in the specific place that was here-with-her.
"The east window," he said. "Yes. Absolutely yes."
"Don't make it into a thing," she said.
"I'm making it into exactly the right-sized thing," he said, and crossed the room, and she let him.
Priya's reaction, by text, was four messages in rapid succession:
FINALLY
I've been waiting since March (last year's March, the FIRST March, the March when I SAID so)
I need a room at the Vancouver place for at least two weeks a year, that's non-negotiable
Also please tell him I will be collecting on the book recommendation he owes me. He knows which one.
Nisha showed Jamie the texts.
"The book is Piranesi," he said immediately.
"She's already read Piranesi."
"She told me she hadn't."
"She lied to you to see how you'd answer."
He looked at her. "She did?"
"She does that. She's assessing your instincts." Nisha looked at the texts. "You passed, by the way. She told me in November."
"She told you in November and you're telling me now?"
"I didn't want you to get smug about it."
He looked at her with an expression that was approximately sixty percent offended and forty percent charmed, which was the ratio she'd identified as optimal for his specific face and which she had done nothing at all to engineer.
"Connor wants to meet her," he said.
"I know. She's aware. She's evaluating the request."
"She's evaluating—"
"She has standards," Nisha said. "She'll let him know when she's ready."
"He's going to find that both alarming and very interesting."
"I know," Nisha said. "That's why I haven't discouraged it."
On the last night of February, they sat on the floor of the Vancouver apartment with takeout containers and the Bright Fault project open on both their laptops — the two-people-building-from-opposite-directions concept, which had acquired a more specific shape over three months of interrupted conversations. It was about a city, partly. A place built by two people who'd never met, from blueprints they'd separately drafted in different decades, and what they found when the city turned out to be the same one.
"The meeting point," Nisha said. "Where the blueprints converge. What do they find?"
"Each other," Jamie said. "That's the game."
"That's too simple."
"The best answers are simple. What they find is: the city works. The thing they built separately, without knowing the other was building it — it fits together." He looked at the screen. "Because they were building toward the same thing all along. The problem is getting them to look at it long enough to understand what it is."
She thought about this. She thought about Watershed and Undertow and Signal and the coastal town with shifting tides and the message that was missing a digit, and she thought about two games made separately about the same space and a convention that had put them in the same room.
"Yes," she said. "That's the game."
"It's also—" He stopped.
"I know what it's also," she said.
He looked at her. She looked back at him. They were sitting on the floor of an apartment in Vancouver with takeout and two laptops and the inlet going dark outside the window, and somewhere in Toronto Priya was evaluating whether to allow Connor Walsh to be introduced to her, and the east room had a window with morning light in it.
"Tell me you felt it," he said. It was a quote she'd know — one of his notes in the characters file, the thing she'd read the night they'd set up the Glitch folder and she'd been looking at character documents at two in the morning. Tell me you felt it too. Just say it once.
She looked at him. She thought: five years of being too careful. She thought: the protagonist decides to be found.
"I felt it," she said. "From the minute you sat down at my table." She paused. "I knew it was something before the appetizers came."
"I knew at the wine list," he said.
"That fast."
"I ordered the Grüner Veltliner and looked at you and I was — it was already a problem." He looked at her. "I've been trying to figure out how to deserve it for five years."
"You don't have to deserve it," she said. "It's not a test."
"I know." He looked at the laptop screen, the city blueprints that were both of them. "I'm going to build this game with you," he said. "Not as a Bright Fault project. Ours."
She considered this. She thought about the specific cost and pleasure of working with someone — the thing she'd been managing around for five years, the thing she'd told herself she thought about the way she thought about things she wouldn't do yet.
"Still Water Fault," she said.
He looked at her. "Yes," he said immediately. "That's the name."
"We'll fight about the logo."
"We'll fight about everything," he said. "And the game will be better for it."
She looked at him. She thought: probably. Yes. She thought: this is the thing I was building toward without knowing it. Not the game. The working together. The person to argue with.
"Okay," she said.
"Okay?"
"Yes," she said. "Let's make a game together."
He reached over and closed both laptops, which she registered as a clear statement of priorities, and she laughed — the real kind, the one that arrived without announcement — and he looked at her with the expression she'd finally stopped trying to manage and was simply glad to have.
"I love you," he said. It was, she noted, the first time either of them had said it with this specific precision, though it had been in everything for months. He said it the way he said most things: directly, with care, without the performance of vulnerability because there was no need for it. He simply meant it.
She held it. She let it mean what it meant.
"I know," she said.
"Nisha."
"I love you too," she said. "I built it into two games. You're a little late."
He looked at her. The expression — warm, specific, full of the particular quality of someone who had found the thing and was keeping it — and she thought: there. That's the ending.
Not the ending — the beginning. Which was the same thing, in the right story.
"Come here," she said. "It's your own apartment and you're sitting too far away."
He moved. He was right there.
Outside, Vancouver was going on being Vancouver — the inlet and the mountains and the February darkness — and inside, two people with their laptops closed were in the middle of the thing that was theirs, the thing that had started at a wrong table and run through five years of the wrong shape and arrived here: a floor in February, a game with a better name than they'd planned, the east room with the morning light.
The glitch, Priya had said. Call it a glitch and fix it.
Fixed.
The real question — not the award, not the geography, not the practical shape of any of it — was what they were willing to do about the thing that had always been true. They had answered it. They kept answering it.
They were still there.
End