Chapter 2
Chapter 2: Three Courses
He ordered the wine without performing it, which Nisha clocked immediately.
Some people used wine lists the way they used business cards — as proof of something. They asked the sommelier pointed questions about the region, deployed vocabulary at conversational volume, treated the whole exercise as an audition. Jamie looked at the list for thirty seconds, asked the server what the kitchen was doing with the black cod tonight, and ordered a Grüner Veltliner with the specific confidence of someone who wanted to drink it rather than talk about it.
The server left. Nisha rearranged her fork.
"Good choice," she said, because it was.
"It felt like a Grüner Veltliner situation." He said it without explanation, which was somehow funnier. Then, reading her look: "The menu leans acidic. Citrus forward. And it's—" He gestured at the window, the dark street outside, the particular quality of an October Thursday that had been overcast all week. "Not a red wine Thursday."
"You have very strong opinions about this."
"I have strong opinions about most things. I try to only deploy the food ones when asked."
"I didn't ask."
"You said good choice in the tone of someone about to ask a follow-up question."
Nisha looked at him. He was watching her with the expression she'd already catalogued once — the one that arrived in the eyes first, measured and bright, the kind of attention that had a quality to it. Like it was interested in what it found.
She picked up the menu. "What are you having."
The wine came. The appetizers came. Somewhere in the interval between the two, Nisha stopped waiting for the evening to be over.
It was the kind of thing she couldn't have articulated in the moment — it wasn't a decision, exactly. More a noticing. One minute she was aware of the empty chair, the unrequited plan, the specific absurdity of sitting across from a stranger because two other strangers couldn't be bothered to be on time. And then she was in the middle of a conversation about whether the city's restaurant scene had peaked, and the awareness was just gone.
Jamie talked the way some people moved — easily, without self-consciousness about the space he occupied. He had opinions (the restaurant scene had not peaked, it had just bifurcated — the mid-range was dying but the real places were getting better) and he delivered them as though he was curious whether she'd disagree. She did, mostly. She said the bifurcation was real but he was wrong about what was dying. He asked why. She told him. He listened — actually listened, the kind where you can tell because the follow-up question is about what you said and not about what they wanted to say next.
"So where are you from?" he asked, at some point between the first glass and the second.
"Here. Mississauga, technically, but I've lived in Toronto since university."
"Right. So you know every good restaurant in this city and have opinions about all of them."
"I have opinions about most things. I try to only deploy the food ones when—"
"Don't." He pointed at her with his fork. "I said it first. That was mine."
"You said you deploy them when asked. I deploy them when warranted. Different."
He smiled. "That's a more aggressive philosophy."
"I'm a more aggressive person."
She didn't know why she said it. It was true, but she didn't usually say it to strangers, and she watched him register it — the slight recalibration, the way he filed it somewhere rather than smoothing over it. He didn't smooth things over. She'd noticed that.
"What do you do?" he asked.
Nisha ate a piece of bread. "I make games."
The pause that followed was the particular pause of someone reshuffling their assumptions. She watched it happen.
"Video games," she said, to help.
"No, I—" He set down his fork. "You're an indie developer?"
"I run a studio. Technically it's me and contract work, but. Yes."
He was looking at her with an expression she couldn't immediately place — not surprise, exactly. Something more alert than surprise. "What games?"
"My most recent is called Watershed." She said it the way she always said it to people who didn't know — neutrally, ready to explain, ready for the blank look or the polite interest. "Narrative puzzle. Atmospheric. It's about a woman reconstructing her mother's life through a flooded town."
"I know Watershed."
She looked at him.
"I've played about half of it," he said. "I was going to finish it this trip but I ran out of time. The chapter with the photograph boxes — I had to stop because it was—" He paused, and she watched him choose the honest word over the safe one. "It was a lot. In a good way. In the best way."
Nisha looked at her wine glass.
"Still Water Games," he said. "That's you?"
"That's me."
He was quiet for a moment, and she could see him doing the math — the studio name, her name, the coincidence of a Thursday in October. Then he ran a hand through his hair with the specific gesture of someone who has just realised something and is deciding what to do with it.
"I'm in Toronto for the game design conference," he said. "TIGA Canada. Three days of panels and networking dinners that all blend into one. Tonight was supposed to be—" He stopped. "Connor set it up. My business partner. He said Sophie was in events and I'd like her."
"And Priya said Arjun was in finance but not finance-finance and had been to Oaxaca."
"High bar."
"She had very specific criteria."
He picked up his glass. "I'm a game developer," he said. "That's what I do. Creative director at Bright Fault Games. We're out of Vancouver." He looked at her with the expression of someone placing a card on the table and watching to see what she does with it. "Our latest is called Undertow."
Nisha had played twenty minutes of Undertow at PAX East the previous spring, at a small booth with a two-person queue. She had not thought about it again until this moment, at which point she thought about it quite clearly: kinetic, coastal, the kind of game that gave you the feeling of moving through water even when you were running. A missing brother. Clues scattered through a town that shifted with the tides.
"I played a demo," she said.
"PAX East?"
"You were there?"
"Manning the booth for two of those days. The other day was my co-founder. What did you think?" He asked it directly, without the performance of not caring, which she found immediately more interesting than if he had.
"I thought the movement system was the best I'd played in an indie title in two years," she said. "I thought the emotional architecture of the first act was set up better than it paid off, but I only played twenty minutes and I'm aware that's an incomplete read."
"The second act pays it off," he said. "I'll grant you the setup and the payoff aren't symmetrical in the demo build. We fixed it in the full release."
"When was the full release?"
"February." He looked at her. "You didn't play the full release."
"I was finishing Watershed in February."
"Fair." He was smiling slightly. "Come back to me when you've played it and tell me if the second act earns it."
"I will," she said.
She meant it, which was strange. She didn't usually say I will to strangers at wrong-table dinners about playing their games and reporting back. She didn't usually assume there would be a back to report to. But he'd said it like it was obvious, and she'd said it like she agreed, and now the sentence was sitting between them with a kind of easy permanence that she decided not to examine.
The mains arrived. Arjun texted at some point during them — a proper apology this time, longer, genuinely contrite, the work emergency had been real and unavoidable, he'd make it up to her, truly — and Nisha read it, typed back something gracious, and put the phone in her bag.
"Everything okay?" Jamie asked.
"Arjun. Formal apology. He wants to reschedule."
"Are you going to?"
She considered this. Arjun was probably perfectly fine. Arjun had been to Oaxaca and cared about sustainable investment and photographed well, and Nisha's life was well-organised and had a clear gap in it where a person could reasonably go.
"Probably not," she said.
Jamie looked at her. He didn't ask why. She appreciated that he didn't ask why.
"Sophie texted too," he said. "Earlier. Similar message — actual work crisis, she's sorry. She seemed nice."
"Are you going to reschedule?"
"I don't come back to Toronto that often." He said it without weight, just as fact. "It was a one-trip window. Connor will be disappointed."
"Mine won't be," Nisha said. "Priya texted twelve minutes ago asking how it's going. I haven't responded."
"What does she think you're doing right now?"
"Having dinner with Arjun and deciding if he warrants a second date."
"And instead you're—"
"Having dinner with a stranger who sat down at my table uninvited."
He smiled — the real one, not the almost-version. "To be fair, you said sit down."
"I said it before someone thought you were waiting for a table."
"You saved me from public embarrassment."
"I was protecting the other diners from the awkwardness."
"Very civic of you."
"I'm an extremely civic person."
He looked at her over the candle, and for a moment neither of them said anything, and the restaurant went on being itself around them — the low warm noise of it, cutlery and conversation and the specific hum of a place that understood what an evening could be. Nisha ate her fish and thought, with the half-attention of someone in the middle of something good, that she couldn't remember the last time a Thursday had turned like this.
Dessert was the small menu and the implicit question of whether they ordered it.
They ordered it.
"Watershed," Jamie said, while they were waiting for it. He'd been quiet for a moment, in the way of someone who has been thinking about what to say and has decided to say it. "The photograph boxes chapter. There's a memory — the rain on the glass and the mother's voice reading the labels out loud. I had to put the controller down."
Nisha looked at him. "That chapter's autobiographical," she said. "Loosely. The mother isn't the same, but the — the way memory works in it. The way objects hold things after someone's gone." She paused. She didn't usually say this to people, either. "My mother died when I was sixteen."
"I'm sorry," he said. Not the reflexive kind, not the kind that immediately pivots to something more comfortable. Just: I'm sorry. Like he meant it and knew it was insufficient and said it anyway.
"It's why I made the game," she said. "Which is also why I can't play it. I've never played the full release. I can't be objective about it."
"I don't think you're supposed to be objective about it. I think that's the point."
She looked at him.
"Undertow is about my brother," he said. "He's not missing — I want to be clear, he's entirely fine, he lives in Victoria and calls me every Sunday. But he left when I was fifteen, moved out, and there was this period where I kept going to places we'd been and looking for the version of him that was there. And the game is about that. The looking."
"The tidal town," Nisha said.
"The tidal town. Things shift. Things come back in different forms. You find pieces." He lifted a shoulder. "Connor said I should be less obvious about it. I said the obvious ones are the ones that land."
"He's wrong."
"He knows he's wrong. He just likes being on record as having had the note."
Dessert arrived. Nisha ate three bites of something involving dark chocolate and thought about the photograph boxes chapter and the version of Undertow she'd played at PAX and the way he'd said the looking with the specific weight of someone who knew exactly what they were describing.
"How long have you been running Still Water?" he asked.
"Three years. Watershed took most of that. I launched it in June."
"And before that?"
"Two years at a mid-size studio. Before that, university. U of T — comp sci and design." She looked at him. "You?"
"UBC. Same rough combination. Two studios in Vancouver after that, then Bright Fault when I was twenty-four." He smiled at something. "Connor and I started it with a friend named Marcus who left after eighteen months to become a landscape architect. We don't talk about Marcus."
"That's a very specific career pivot."
"He was always very into the outdoor levels." He paused. "That's a game design joke that only lands if you—"
"I got it."
"Right. Of course." He looked at her with the expression he'd been wearing on and off all evening — the interested one, the one that seemed to be doing something with what it found. "Do you work alone? In the studio?"
"Mostly. I contract out the audio, and I had a consultant for some of the puzzle mechanics. But the design, the writing, the code — that's just me." She paused. "It's—" She tried to say lonely and found she didn't want to. "Focused."
"I work better alone," he said, "but I don't like it. I need people in the room. Connor and I talk through every major design decision out loud, which drives both of us insane. But the games are better for it." He tilted his head slightly. "Do you ever think about working with someone?"
"I think about it the way I think about a lot of things I won't do yet," she said.
He didn't push it. He just nodded, like that was a complete answer, which it was.
The restaurant had thinned while they weren't paying attention to it. The tables around them were mostly empty now; the Thursday-night crowd had turned into Friday somewhere along the way. A server was quietly resetting a table two down, the one that had been his for approximately six minutes.
Nisha looked at the time. Quarter to eleven.
She looked back at Jamie.
He was watching her with the particular quality of someone who had arrived at a question and was deciding whether to be the one to say it.
She got there first.
"It's late," she said.
"It is," he said.
"You have the conference tomorrow."
"Last day. Morning keynote, then it wraps at three." He looked at her. "You have—"
"Nothing until ten. I'm freelance. My schedule is my problem."
He picked up his wine glass, found it empty, set it down. The candle had burned to almost nothing. The server was making gentle distance-maintaining movements around the perimeter.
"There's a bar," Jamie said, "two streets over. I noticed it on the way here. It looked like the kind of bar that stays open on a Thursday."
Nisha looked at him.
"I'm not suggesting anything," he said, with the faint quality of a man who was absolutely suggesting something and being honest about the fact that he wasn't going to pretend otherwise. "I just — it's not eleven yet, and we've been talking for three hours, and I would like to keep talking. That's the full proposal."
Nisha thought about the empty apartment and the build she'd been debugging for a week and the Friday morning she had nothing scheduled until ten.
She picked up her bag.
"Pay the bill," she said. "We'll find out what kind of bar it is."