I answer her, "engagement, weighted against baseline variance, flagged for context," and watch her process it. Her forehead wrinkles for a moment like she's trying to decipher a complex foreign language.
"That's what I thought," she says. "But I wanted to check against your model rather than assume."
She saysyour modellike it's a compliment.
She leaves. Noah watches her go, then turns back to me with an expression of theatrical patience that I find unreasonable.
"You still certain this is purely professional?" he says.
I return my attention to my screen.
"She asks your opinion a lot," he adds.
"She asks precise questions because she thinks precisely. That isn't unusual."
Noah picks up his file and says nothing. Just gives me a look of quiet, unconvinced disbelief, which is somehow more effective than if he'd pressed the point. He never needed to deliver a file in the first place.
After he's gone, I find myself watching through the glass wall of Conference Room A.
Tessa is seated across from a client in his mid-forties with the tense posture of someone who arrived expecting bad news. He'd come in twenty minutes ago with a problem "too big for a relationship fix."
Now he's leaning back in his chair.
Tessa says something I can't hear. He laughs, unexpectedly and genuinely, and then she laughs too, briefly covering her mouth with her hand like she didn't plan for it to happen.
I had categorized her function here as problem-solving: intake, assessment, resolution. Clean and efficient. I was not wrong, exactly.
But she's not just solving problems.
She's making people feel like their problem was never as large as it seemed. Like they walked in carrying something heavy and she quietly showed them it was hollow.
I have never been particularly skilled at that.
I had always assumed Tessa Bloom was simply competent.
The data, I'm finding, suggests something considerably more complicated.
I may need to revise my model.
