“And miss the look on his face when he presents it?” He kissed Nina’s head. “Not a chance.”
DREW ARRIVED AT TEN-fifteen, let himself in without knocking — he’d stopped knocking around visit three — and came through the door carrying champagne and a gift bag that crinkled with tissue paper and the unmistakable energy of a man who had been waiting twelve months to say I told you so.
“Look at this.” He stood in the middle of the cabin, turning slowly, taking in the merged life of us — my laptop beside his maps, trail shoes beside hiking boots, wildflowers in a mason jar on the dining table, a bassinet where the manual used to live. “Three of you. Look at you three.”
His grin was enormous. “The algorithm works.”
“Drew,” Cliff said from the kitchen, where he was leaning against the counter with his arms crossed.
“Twelve months. Married, baby, property on the line, still together.” He pointed at me, then at Cliff. “Genuinely in love. I can see it. I have metrics for this.”
“You do not have metrics for this.” Cliff’s arms stayed crossed.
“I absolutely have metrics for this.” Drew set the champagne on the counter and produced an envelope from his jacket. “Fifty thousand. The second half. As agreed.” He placed it beside the bottle as though completing a sacred exchange. “Debt forgiven. Property secured. You’re welcome.”
Cliff picked up the envelope. He didn’t open it. He looked at it, then at me, then at Nina asleep in the bassinet between my laptop and the wildflowers. The quiet weight of what he said next stopped Drew’s grin for half a second.
“Thank you.”
Drew recovered. “The algorithm,” he said, “does not lie.”
“You’ve mentioned.”
“I’m going to mention it at every visit for the rest of your life.” He crouched beside the bassinet and lowered his voice, which for Drew meant only slightly louder than a normal person’s speaking volume. “Hey, Nina. Your dad called my app complete bullshit. Look at him now.”
“She’s asleep.” Cliff’s voice was flat.
“She’s absorbing.” Drew stood. “I’m putting this family in the testimonial section.”
“You are not.”
“Anonymous. I’ll change the names.”
“Drew.”
“Fine.” He adjusted his jacket. “But I’m telling my wife tonight.”
He stayed for an hour. He held Nina, who slept through the entire visit with the serene indifference of someone who had already mastered the art of ignoring Drew Kepler. He told us about Night Shift Mates, launching in August, with the evangelical enthusiasm of a man who would never stop believing every person on earth deserved to be matched by his software. He asked about my consulting work, whether the satellite internet survived client calls, and I caught myself answering with genuine warmth — not because I’d warmed to Drew, exactly, but because the man who’d engineered the bet that started this disaster had also, in his insufferable way, been right.
When he left, he hugged Cliff, who tolerated it with the posture of a man enduring weather, and hugged me, and told us he’d be back whether we invited him or not.
“He’s insufferable,” Cliff said after the SUV disappeared down the mountain road.
“He was right.”
“Both things.”
He picked up the champagne and put it in the cabinet with the other four.
THAT EVENING I FOUNDNina on the living room floor in her bouncer, gumming with dedication on something that looked familiar.
I crouched down. A page from the manual. The remaining forty-six pages — Cliff had torn out the first for his partnership agreement — had been propping up the wobbly leg of the dining table for three months. One page had worked loose and found its way into small determined hands that cared nothing for conception timelines or communication protocols but cared very much about the chewability of laminated paper.
I pulled it free. Section 12: Conflict Resolution Framework. Nina’s mouth had blurred the ink on “structured cooling-off period” into a purple smear.
“That’s fair,” I told her. “That section needed revision anyway.”
I tucked the page back under the table leg and picked her up. She smelled of milk and cedar, the two scents that had braided together into what home smelled like now.
