"You should not have done that," I say.
It comes out more formal. Everything comes out more formal when I am frightened, which is a personality flaw I havecatalogued extensively but been unable to correct despite three separate courses of professional development.
Livia tilts her head. "Torn up a piece of paper?"
"Prevented me from using proper professional channels to manage the situation." I take the two and a half feet and make them three. I turn toward the window, which is the large one that looks out over the rain-slicked street, the one I chose this apartment for specifically because the scale is right and because the glass is reinforced and because standing at it on difficult evenings creates the impression of a manageable boundary between myself and the city outside. "I have been processing the available data for several weeks. The transfer request is the statistically sound outcome."
"The statistically sound outcome," she repeats, and her voice is quiet and very flat in the way that I have learned, across these weeks, indicates that she is not agreeing with me.
"Inter-species relationships." I fold my hands behind my back. My knuckles are pressing together harder than is comfortable. "The sociological literature is not encouraging. Longitudinal studies across the last two decades demonstrate a seventy-eight percent higher incidence of sustained social friction for couples with significant physiological divergence. Higher rates of public hostility. Elevated stress markers for the human partner particularly." I pause. "Your cortisol levels concern me on a chronic basis."
"My cortisol levels."
"You hold tension in your shoulders. You have since the first evening. I notice it particularly when you are in public with me." I keep my eyes on the window. "This is not a sustainable model, Livia. The dinner party was not an isolated incident. It was a data point in a trend. Tonight's event follows the pattern with almost mathematical precision. And the friction will compound. My presence in your social sphere creates a recurring liabilitythat your existing relationships cannot absorb, as evidenced by the restructuring you performed this evening at the restaurant, which was significant collateral damage that I feel a specific and acute responsibility for generating."
I am very aware that I am talking too much. This is a known mechanism, the way I build walls out of words because I have very few other materials available and the walls need to be high enough to contain the things I am not saying, which are considerably less organized and considerably more distressing than the things I am.
The things I am saying are, broadly, accurate. The literature is real. The statistics are real. I have read the studies more than once. I have cross-referenced them with demographic modelling and social integration data and regional hostility indices and I have, in the very worst part of three consecutive nights last week, built a formal probability model of my own and run Livia's life trajectory through it twice, once with my continued presence as a variable, once without, and the results were not ambiguous.
"So you've built a spreadsheet," Livia says.
"A model." I correct this on professional reflex and then immediately wish I hadn't. "A risk-adjusted model incorporating several key variables."
The silence extends. The rain outside has the particular persistence of a city storm that has decided it is here for the duration. I watch a bus pass on the street below, its windows blurred with condensation, its passengers visible in smeared impressions of ordinary human lives proceeding in ordinary human directions, and I think, not for the first time, that I have always been better at watching ordinary human lives from a moderate distance than participating in them.
I became an actuary for this reason. I am very good at the mathematics of other people's futures. I am very good at assessing risk and quantifying probability and preparingagainst outcomes that have not yet arrived but are statistically inevitable. I am good at this because it gives me something to do with the part of my brain that cannot stop calculating, the part that looked at Livia Chordas sitting in that cocktail bar in her sensible cardigan with her dark hair tucked behind her ear and immediately began running projections for every possible way this ends badly.
There are seventy-three distinct pathways.
Fifty-one of them result from sustained social attrition. Nine from my own failures of self-regulation. Thirteen from miscellaneous factors I have categorised as environmental.
None of them, and I want to be extremely clear about this, because the precision matters, none of them feel as bad as the one I am currently executing.
"Narod."
Her voice is different. Not flat now. Something softer than that, and I don't turn around because I know something about the particular quality of that softness and I know it will compromise my processing.
"The seventy-eight percent," she says. "Is that the actual number?"
"Yes."
"And you sat in your apartment and built a model with me in it."
"I ran it twice." I pause. "I ran it three times. I changed the regional variable when I considered that Minneapolis has a documented lower incidence of interspecies hostility in metropolitan areas. The model improved marginally."
"Marginally."
"Three and a half percent. Which is," I add, because I cannot stop myself, "within the margin of error and therefore statistically inconclusive."
"Narod." A long pause. "Turn around."
I don't want to. This is not a statement I make often, because I spent the majority of my adult life training myself out of wanting things that are strategically inadvisable, and I have been broadly successful. I do not want things that will break. I do not sit on chairs that weren't rated for my weight. I do not eat at restaurants whose tables can't withstand the incidental pressure of a hand placed flat against them while I'm reaching for the pepper. I have calibrated my desires very precisely to match the available structural capacity of the environment I inhabit.
Livia Chordas is not calibrated. She arrived with no structural documentation whatsoever and she grabbed my wrist in a cocktail bar with her tiny, furious hand and saidyou're an actuary, like actually, and every model I had ran directly off its own axis.
I turn around.
She is standing in the same position, hands at her sides, chin lifted slightly the way she does when she is refusing to concede a point. She is in the dark jeans she wore to the dinner party and the cream-coloured blouse she picked carefully because she wanted to look appropriate for her friends, and her hair is damp at the ends from the rain, and her glasses have a very faint smear on the left lens from where she pushed them up in the cab because she was thinking hard, and I know she was thinking hard because she always pushes them up when she is calculating, and I know this because I have been paying attention.
