"Tessa didn't try to reshape anything," he says.
The railing is cold under my palms, metal and solid and real, and I focus on that for a moment because it's easier than focusing on the fact that he's correct. She had never once tried to make me into something more legible, more convenient, more warm. She had just seen me. Clearly, without flinching, without asking me to be otherwise.
"She understood me," I say finally. Even saying it out loud feels like decrypting something I'd buried in a file I wasn't supposed to open. My voice does something I don't intend it to do.
Daniel smiles, slow and a little sad, the way people smile when they already knew the answer before they asked. "Yeah," he says. "That's usually how it works."
I want to respond with something analytical, something that gives me back the distance. I find, for once in my life, that I have nothing.
***
Baxter greets me at the door like I've been gone for three weeks rather than a few hours, spinning tight circles near the kitchen, nails clicking against the hardwood with urgent, percussive joy. I crouch down and let him climb half onto my lap, which he shouldn't be able to do given his size, and yet.
I walk him around the block and he inspects every lamppost. I find that genuinely admirable. I mean this sincerely. He doesn't skip any. He has a system. I respect the system.
Back inside, I sit down in front of the laptop and stare at the ERS dashboard for a full minute without opening it. The screen reflects my face back at me, which is not useful information.
I want to run my profile through.
Every staff member filled out a profile as part of our intake process, but under normal circumstances we filter our staff out of the matching options.
I remove the staff filter. I don't deliberate about it. I just do it.
I pull up my own profile and run the algorithm. It takes eleven seconds.
When the results load, Tessa's name is at the top.
I sit with that for a moment. Then I open the relationship metrics dashboard and build a trend line from the interaction data the two of us generated across four months, which is a completely rational thing to do, a data-driven thing to do, and not at all the behavior of a man sitting alone at midnight with a dog asleep on his feet and a cold cup of coffee he forgot to drink.
The graph climbs in a long, steady arc. It dips sharply. I know exactly which week that was, exactly what I said, the specific and unnecessary precision with which I said it. And then it just stops, suspended, waiting.
I scroll through the successful couple profiles on the screen, all of them, and every single one has the same shape. A climb,a dip, a near-collapse. And then, a recovery. It is not defined by compatibility scores or algorithmic weighting, but by a single variable that I built no metric to capture: someone chose to stay.
I stare at the pattern until my coffee is fully cold and Baxter has started to snore against my ankle.
Then I close the laptop. I don't need the data.
It only confirms what I already know.
The answer has always been there. Right in front of me. If I am brave enough to reach for it.
For her.
For us.
