She looks at me, then around at the guests quickly before she looks back at me.
"What are you doing?" she asks, and I'm fairly certain she's asking two questions at once.
"I'm trying to—" I stop. I rehearsed nothing for this moment.
Behind me I can feel the room like a held breath.
"You were leaving," I say, because that's where I have to start. That's the thing I can't get past.
"I was giving you an exit," she says.
The precision of it hits somewhere undefended. She framed her own leaving as a gift to me. And I understand, standing here in front of forty witnesses and a slightly crooked hair clip, that she has been doing this for months. Making things easier. For me.
"I'm used to using logic," I say, and the words come out rougher than I mean them to, scraped over something I haven't quite named yet. "To stay at a safe distance from things. Especially things that require—" I pause. "Feelings."
Her chin lifts a fraction.
"I treated the question of you like a problem I needed to solve," I say. "And I was wrong, and I knew I was wrong, and I kept doing it anyway."
Something crosses her face quickly and she looks toward the corridor for exactly two seconds before she looks back. Two seconds that feel like I'm waiting for a verdict.
"The algorithm matched us," I say, and I watch her go still in a way that is different from the stillness before. Something shifts. Something opens.
"George."
"Even if it hadn't," I say, and my voice is steadier than I deserve for this moment, in this room, in front of these people. "Even if the data had pointed somewhere else entirely—I choose you."
The corridor light catches the gold clip in her hair again, still crooked, and I don't know why that's the detail that makes all of this feel real. Not the microphone or the speech or the forty people behind me. That small, crooked thing.
She looks at me for a long moment, the kind you don't fill, the kind you wait inside, and her eyes are doing something that is absolutely not nothing. She hasn't answered. The room behind me still isn't breathing.
I stand in the fact of what I've just said like a man who has stepped off a ledge and is waiting, with genuine interest, to find out what comes next.
