"You maintain that connection."
"Loosely. We see each other occasionally in this city by coincidence." "He doesn't know what I do. He thinks I work in finance." "The cover holds with him."
"The cover holds everywhere," Alistair said. "Except—" He stopped.
"Except?" Tav said.
Alistair studied the table. "Except in this apartment," he said. "Increasingly."
The café was its usual busy afternoon self. The noise was appropriate and the light was the amber October light coming through the east-facing windows.
"Who were you?" Tav said. "Before."
Alistair considered this question with the attention it deserved.
"Someone who wanted things very specifically," he said. "Architecture. A particular kind of life.
Friends who thought in similar registers." "Someone who hadn't yet learned that caring about things was a liability in the context where I was going to spend my career." He looked at Tav. "I learned that
lesson very efficiently. And then I spent several years forgetting the right parts of it and retaining the wrong parts."
"The wrong parts being?"
"The idea that the caring itself was the problem." He held the look. "It isn't. The caring was never the problem. The problem was that Ablation's framework treated it as one."
Tav watched him.
"And this framework," Tav said.
"This framework," Alistair said carefully, "is something I'm in the process of deciding about."
"Deciding what?"
"Whether it's better," he said. "Than the frameworks that preceded it."
Tav studied his coffee.
"It's different," he said.
"Yes." Alistair's expression was the warm, honest version. "Very different."
They sat in the café and drank their coffees and said very little for the next thirty minutes, like two people who had arrived somewhere significant and were sitting inside it without needing to narrate the arrival.
Outside the window, October continued its deliberate work.
• • •
CHAPTER SEVEN
— NAOMI —
Naomi arrived with coffee and the unerring instinct as she had developed a sixth sense for unresolved tension.
She took one look at the two of them standing in the hallway outside Alistair's bedroom — at the space between them, at the precise inch of distance that had replaced whatever had been happening when she knocked — and said: "Oh, this is significantly worse than I imagined."
Alistair leaned against the doorframe with practiced ease. "You imagined things?"
"Concerning things." She stepped past him into the apartment with the comfortable authority and decided she belonged there. "And apparently I was conservative."
