She accepts this without pushing, and I notice the deliberate not-pushing of it. The space she leaves around the edges of things, the way she never applies pressure to a door that isn't open.
It's either very respectful or very perceptive, and I suspect it's both.
"Camden Drake's PR team called again," she adds, already straightening, already moving on. "They want you to go over his metrics and send a brief."
She's gone before I can respond, and the doorway is just a doorway again.
I pull up a blank spreadsheet.
***
For the first time in four years of building models designed to quantify human connection, I suspect my own data is compromised.
I sit with that thought for a long, uncomfortable moment while the office settles into its end-of-day quiet around me. I hear the distant sound of a printer, someone laughing in the kitchen, and the soft percussion of the building doing what buildings do.
I think about Tessa kneeling on my living room floor last night, laughing with her whole face while Baxter attempted to lick her ear. I think about how I'd stood in the kitchen doorway watching her and thought, for reasons I hadn't examined, that it was the least complicated I'd felt in months.
I think about the women before her. The ones who had eventually, inevitably, begun adjusting me. It started small with my schedule, then moved to my habits, and then trying to change how I operated. Finally, the adjustments outnumbered everything else and I cut ties.
Tessa has rearranged nothing.
And yet somehow, quietly, without my knowledge or consent, everything has begun to reorganize itself around her anyway. Like a system that's found a more efficient equilibrium while the engineer wasn't looking.
I set down my pen.
I have spent three years building models to prove that compatibility is measurable, predictable, and most importantly, controllable.
I have staked a professional reputation on this.
I may have staked rather more than that.
It occurs to me, with the specific discomfort of a man who is rarely wrong about systems, that I may have forgotten to account for myself as a variable.
I close my laptop.
And for the first time in recent memory, I leave the office without checking my email one final time. Because there is, apparently, something I'd rather think about on the drive home.
