I reach up and tuck a piece of Livia's hair behind her ear, which has come loose from where she pinned it this morning, and I feel the slight catch of her breath that she makes when I do something unexpected, which is a sound I have been cataloguing in an entirely different kind of spreadsheet. I lower my head andI kiss her, unhurriedly, in the way I kiss her when I mean it and not the way I kiss her when we are in a hurry, and she makes a small sound against my mouth and brings one hand up to my lapel and holds the croissant in the other with great presence of mind, and the conference room is absolutely silent.
When I straighten back up, she is looking at me with her chin slightly lifted and her glasses minutely askew and the expression on her face that I have been trying to find the right actuarial notation for since approximately the third week and have ultimately concluded cannot be represented in any existing model. She reaches up and straightens her glasses with one finger.
"The partners are still here," she says very quietly, though it sounds distinctly like a fact she is presenting rather than a concern she particularly holds.
"The partners," I say and nod. I keep eye contact when I say it, because the location and professional standing of every individual in this room has been comprehensively accounted for in my assessment of the situation, and I have decided that the current priorities outweigh the associated risks by a statistically significant margin.
"You don't appear especially concerned about that," she observes, and there is something in her voice that sounds like she is testing a hypothesis, like she is running the numbers on a version of me that she has not entirely seen before and is now cataloguing for future reference.
"I am not especially concerned about that," I confirm, still holding her gaze. Her pupils dilate very slightly behind her glasses.
Her mouth does the thing that is not quite a smile but contains an entire smile inside it, compressed, warm and entirely intended for me, and I feel it in the same place I felt the hair-tuck and the sound she made, which is the same place Ihave apparently been feeling everything for eleven weeks, which is every available square inch of me.
I grab the bakery box. I turn to face the table. Martin, Dhruv, Petra, and Simon are arranged in the specific formation of people who have witnessed something that reorganised the parameters of their morning and are still completing the reorganisation. Martin's pen is held vertically and he is not writing with it. Dhruv has an expression I would classify as benign bewilderment. Petra appears genuinely delighted. Simon's face is doing something that I will tentatively categorise as approval, though his range is narrow and I have limited data.
I place the box in the centre of the table. There are four croissants remaining.
"Second tray," I say. "The cardamom is more developed. I would suggest them while they retain some warmth." I look at Martin specifically, because Martin interrupted Livia six times during the presentation and I feel this information is worth directing at him with some deliberateness. "The Q3 projections she mentioned are supported by the variance analysis in the fourth slide. The numbers are sound. The presentation was exceptional. I would encourage you to tell her so." I button my jacket with one hand, which takes some effort given the tailoring, but I had the suit made specifically to allow for the full range of my shoulder movement and it manages. "I hope the rest of your meeting is productive. Enjoy the pastries."
I look at Livia one more time. She has both hands wrapped around the remnant of her croissant and she is watching me with the steady, clear expression she uses when she has made a decision and is comfortable with it, and it is possible the most settling thing I have ever seen in my life.
"I'll see you tonight," she says. It is not a question.
"Yes," I say. "You will."
I cross the conference room, duck marginally through the doorway, and pull the glass door shut behind me with appropriate gentleness, because it is a glass door and I am making a point but I am not making a point at the expense of the architecture.
The corridor outside is wide and quiet and smells of carpet cleaning solution and recycled air. I walk toward the lifts. My heart is doing something that bears no clinical resemblance to its resting rate, which is a condition I have grown somewhat accustomed to and no longer attempt to regulate. I press the lift button. I wait.
Behind me, through the glass wall of the conference room, I can hear the muffled, specific quality of a room that has resumed conversation after a prolonged silence. Then, distinctly, I hear Dhruv say something I cannot fully make out, and I hear Petra laugh.
The lift arrives.
I step in.
And through the closing gap of the doors, carried clearly through the glass, I hear the voice of the one called Martin, landed flat with the bewilderment of a man assembling data in real time, asking the one question the morning has apparently been building toward.
"Was that... your boyfriend?"
The doors close.
I press the ground floor button, and I allow myself, in the complete privacy of an empty lift, the full, uncontained, entirely inelegant smile that I have been declining to produce for the past fifteen minutes, and I do not attempt to make it look smaller or less conspicuous than it is, because there is no one here to recalibrate it for, and the doors are shut, and I am six foot nine and built like a structural feature, and I am completely,embarrassingly, and with full statistical certainty, in love with a human accountant who asked the bakery about the tray.
CHAPTER 19
NAROD
The silence after the lift doors close lasts approximately four seconds.
Then Martin says it, and the question hangs over the conference table like weather.
I take a calm, deliberate bite of my croissant. The cardamom really is more developed on the second tray. Narod had apparently discussed optimal proofing times with the baker for twenty minutes on a Wednesday, which I know because he texted me about it with the same precise enthusiasm he applies to liability modelling, and I had read the message sitting at my desk with my chin resting in my hand and a completely unprofessional expression on my face.
I chew. I swallow. I set the croissant down with the, unhurried movement of a woman who has decided she is done performing smallness for anybody's comfort.
"Yes," I say, looking at Martin directly. "He is."
Petra makes a sound that is clearly a suppressed laugh. Dhruv is nodding with the expression of someone recalibrating an entire professional relationship in real time. Simon, who has said perhaps forty words to me in three years, blinks once andsays, "Good." Which, from Simon, I understand to be a standing ovation.
