Chapter twenty-five
George
Evelyn appears in my office doorway on a Thursday afternoon with the particular expression she wears when she has already decided something and is framing it as a question.
"I need you in Portland this weekend," she says. "New client. He specifically asked for someone who speaks his language."
"What language?"
"Algorithmic."
I agree, because of course I do, and because it isn't really a question. The logistics assemble themselves quickly enough. Soon I have my flights, hotel, a rental car set up and ready.
What I don't anticipate is the dog sitter problem.
The first place is booked. The second place is booked. The third place is booked, and I let out a sound I would not describe as a groan but which is apparently audible from the hallway.
Tessa stops in the doorway, one hand still on the frame. "Do I want to know?"
I tell her. She listens, and then, with the easy practicality that I have come to recognize as one of her more disarming qualities, offers to watch Baxter for the weekend.
I say yes before I've entirely thought it through.
***
The client meeting is, by every measurable standard, a success. He speaks in probability distributions and confidence intervals and asks questions that remind me why I built ERS in the first place. It is intellectually satisfying in the clean, uncomplicated way that problems with clear solutions always are.
And yet.
In the quiet between meetings, while I wait for room service and watch rain slide down a hotel window twelve floors above a city I do not know, my thoughts drift somewhere I did not intend them to go. Not to the deliverables. Not to the signed contract. It imagines Tessa opening my door to find Baxter waiting. I think about the easy rhythm of the past few weeks, a rhythm I do not realize has settled into my life until I am standing three states away from it.
I classify the feeling as travel fatigue and order coffee.
***
My flight lands forty minutes late, and I spend most of the cab ride home composing reasons why the tightness in my chest is a reasonable physiological response to recycled air and a middle seat.
The porch light is on when the cab pulls up. I don't remember leaving it on.
I hear Baxter before the door is fully open. His nails scratch against the hardwood, and I know he is doing that characteristic scramble of his.
He hits me squarely in the thighs and I grab the doorframe with one hand to keep from going down, the other dropping my bag onto the floor so I can steady myself against seventy pounds of pure, structureless joy.
I let him carry on for longer than I normally would.
When I look up, Tessa is leaning in the kitchen doorway, arms loosely crossed, watching Baxter make a spectacle of himself with something close to affection on her face. She's wearing the dark green sweater, the oversized one, sleeves pushed to her elbows. Something about the way she's standing in my kitchen doorway stops my thinking for half a second. She looks easy, unhurried, and like she belongs here.
"He did that every time I came through the door," she says. "You'd think the bar would lower after a while."
"He has no concept of diminishing returns," I say, and she laughs. The tightness in my chest loosens by some small but measurable amount.
I pull my bag inside and she moves to give me room without being asked, which I notice.
"How was the client?" She drifts back toward the kitchen, and I follow without entirely deciding to.
"Technically fluent, emotionally illiterate," I say. "He kept asking me to assign probability scores to long-term compatibility."
"Did you?" She glances back over her shoulder, and there's a small curve at the corner of her mouth.
