“Thank you.” She sets her backpack down, untangles her scarf, and sits. Cold air and clean shampoo cut through me—simple, deadly.
She opens her laptop. “We have an hour.” She places her phone on the desk, starts a timer with a soft vibration I feel through the table. “Let’s make it count.”
“Trust me, I plan to.”
A corner of her mouth almost moves. Almost.
“Want to start with your project?” she says, tapping my notebook. “I peeked at it last week. You seemed frustrated.”
“Yeah.” I clear my throat and turn the screen her way. “I’m trying to figure out why some releases come off my stick like lightning and others die halfway. I’m tracking what the puck does and what my body does at the same time, then lining them up to see what actually makes the magic.”
“And the problem?”
“They won’t match. It’s like watching two dancers on different songs. Each looks fine alone, but when I put them together, it falls apart.”
She studies the screen, brow furrowed. Then she leans closer, one hand on the trackpad. “Stop making them dance to the same rhythm. Let the puck lead and make the camerafollow. If you keep them fighting for control, you’ll never get a clean read.”
It’s probably ten layers more complicated than that—numbers, algorithms, timing calibrations—but the way she says it suddenly makes perfect sense.
She rewrites a few lines of code, quick and sure, her focus sharp enough to cut through steel. The messy lines smooth into one graceful curve.
“Holy—” I bite it off, grinning instead. “There it is.”
She doesn’t glow or bask. She just exhales, satisfied. “You were measuring acceleration twice. This forces the camera to be the time base.”
A laugh escapes before I can stop it. Heads turn two tables over. “You just saved me from rewriting three weeks of work.”
Her eyes lift to mine like I’ve surprised her. “You actually care about this.”
“That a problem?”
“No.” Her shoulders loosen. “Just…unexpected. I thought maybe this was a—” She makes a small, efficient gesture. “A stunt.”
She means a stunt to get her here, alone, with me. She’s not wrong. She’s also not right anymore.
“I like building things,” I say simply. “Skating’s the obvious part. This is the part that makes my brain quiet.”
She studies the graph once more, then closes the laptop with a decisive pat, satisfied.
“Okay. Torque fixed, calibration stabilized.” She flips open the 204 worksheet, draws a clean line down the page:Assumptions. Known. Unknown. Method.So neat it makes my ribs feel aligned. “Problem set?”
We work through it—she doesn’t do it for me, just points and waits while I run the numbers. When I reach for shortcutsthat’ll bite later, she nudges. “State your assumptions.” I do. She catches a sloppy exponent, lets me fix it without commentary. Somehow that feels better than praise.
The timer hits forty minutes. She caps her pen, lines everything up neat and parallel. “We’ve still got time. Want to go over next week’s reading?”
I could. I should. That’s what I’m paying her for.
But what I actually want is more ofher—her attention, her focus, the way she looks at me when I surprise her.
“Actually,” I lean back, voice dropping, “there’s something else we should discuss.”
She knows I’m pivoting before I pivot. Her eyes narrow. “What’s that?”
“Call it a lab.” I stretch my legs under the table and feel the brush of her boot, light as a thought. She doesn’t move away. “You taught my code to stop tripping over itself. Fair’s fair—I said I’d return the favor.”
She looks skeptical and curious, which for Wren is the same as a yes. “What do you mean?”
“I’ll show you how to change the data people see.”
