He turned towards her, his expression serious.
“Sorry, I thought you were joking because you don’t know me, so…it doesn’t matter.” She took a breath. “What did you mean by ‘it’s veryme’?”
Since she asked specifically, he shared his theory with her. “It is welcoming, cozy, and individual. At first glance it appears chaotic, or cluttered, but it’s not. Everything has its place and is clean. This is how you want the world to be. Brighter, happier, less random, less chaotic.”
“Wow…that’s…” She shook her head. “Are you sure I can’t get you a drink? Water? Coffee? Tea?”
He could see that she needed to do something, so he said, “Water’s fine.”
She filled up two glasses with water, walked to the living area and handed him a single glass as she motioned to the couch. “Do you want to sit down?”
He lowered down onto the far right cushion and sank into it. The couch was a little too soft, the kind that let your bones sink and rearrange, so it was inevitable that their knees ended up brushing, not as a calculated move but as a byproduct of gravity and upholstery. Poppy folded her legs up under her, balancing a pillow on her lap, her hands restless as she alternated between smoothing the frayed piping and tracing the pattern on the cushion. AJ sat with both feet flat, hands on his thighs, but he was careful not to drum his fingertips, aware that the tap-tap-tap could read as impatience or agitation to someone else.
Now that he had her here, he thought about all the things he’d said he wanted to know about her when she was just a face on his computer screen. He wanted to know if she talked with her hands when she told stories, he’d watched her at the reception, and shedidtalk with her hands. He’d wanted to know what she smelled like, she smelled like flowers on a spring day and laundry fresh out of the dryer, two of AJ’s favorite scents. He wanted to know a gesture that made her uniquely her, he saw that whenever she smiled, her nose crinkled a millisecond before. He now also knew the pattern of her breathing, the gait of her walk, and the cadence of her speech, all of which only made him more intrigued by her.
She broke the silence, startling him out of his internal dialogue. “Have you ever thought about changing your life?” Poppy asked, looking around as if the walls themselves might have the answers she was searching for. “I’m talking about everything. Starting over from scratch.”
“Yes,” he answered honestly.
Her head spun towards him, his answer clearly shocked her. “You have?”
“Yes.”
“Why? When? How?”
He answered her first inquiry. “I used to think that I was helping people. But when the lines get blurred and you see that it’s not that simple, then it becomes something you can’t unsee. Like a stereogram.”
“A stereo-what?”
“A Magic Eye picture.”
“Oh, right.”
“I don’t want my life to be something I can’t unsee,” he explained.
“That was unexpectedly poetic.”
There wasnothingpoetic about cybersecurity.
“Have you ever wanted to start over?” he reversed the question. In his experience, people typically asked questions they themselves wanted to answer.
She bit the inside of her cheek as her fingers twirled the fray on the pillow. “I have…I mean, I do. I had a very specific goal for my life, and it turns out that goal is not going to happen. So I’m just sort of recalibrating my life.”
AJ could tell there was a great deal of sadness behind her statement. Not just sadness, but a kind of grief, an awareness that the life she’d wanted had slipped, quietly and irretrievably, through her fingers. He watched her for a moment, letting the silence stretch, disturbed only by the faint click of the kitchen clock and the hissing of rain on the porch. He didn’t know how to comfort people, not in the way that television made it seem possible, with a spontaneous, perfect string of words that would patch over any wound or a hug that fixed things. But he had read, in a book about negotiation, that sometimes the bestapproach was to validate what someone was already feeling. Not to fix, but to witness.
He straightened, then tipped his glass toward her, a careful, deliberate gesture. “To change,” he offered, and although he spoke softly, the words seemed to echo off the books and walls and glass canisters of her little world.
She clinked her glass gently against his. “To change.”
Poppy drank, and when she set her water down, her hand lingered on the rim for a second longer than necessary, as if she needed the chill to ground her again.
AJ watched her, trying to catalog every detail, how she closed her eyes for half a second after swallowing, how her thumb circled the condensation ring, and how her breathing sometimes caught as if she needed to remind herself to exhale. He felt a warmth inside his chest, one he recognized from being around Frankie, or (rarely) his mom, or (on the rarest occasions) Niko. But this was different, because Poppy was not family, and yet she was letting him in, letting herself be fragile in front of him. That trust was a new language, one he wanted to learn how to speak.
He found himself asking, not as a conversation filler but as a true inquiry, “What were you like as a kid?” The question hung in the air, unthreatening but impossible to evade. She blinked, not expecting it, but didn’t shrink from the answer.
“I was…loud,” she said, a self-deprecating smile tugging at her lips. “Obnoxiously so, according to my teachers. I got called ‘spirited’ a lot, which is code for ‘you make the adults tired just by existing.’” She laughed, and the laugh was real, not one of those manufactured ones people used to fill silences. She told him about how her mother would work two and three jobs just to keep their apartment, and sometimes Poppy would stay up late waiting for her, constructing elaborate blanket forts and refusing to sleep until she could crawl in beside her mom and tell her about her day. “It was just me and my mom. I had aneighbor, Miss Carol. She made sure I had clean clothes and my homework done. My mom tried to be there, she used to say, ‘We’re a team, Popsicola. You and me against the world.’”
AJ nodded, absorbing, not interrupting. He saw that her gaze flicked to the fridge, where a photo of her and her mother, arms around each other and faces frozen in mid-laugh, held a place of prominence. The resemblance was striking, but the difference was in the eyes, her mother’s had a few wrinkles surrounding them, as if she’d learned to expect less from life, while Poppy’s retained a kind of stubborn hope, a refusal to capitulate to disappointment.
