Still belonging to someone else's weather system. You watch it move and you think, "It'll break up before it gets here." It doesn't always break up. It wasn't until the Austin trip that the storm finally made landfall.
She told me about the conference on a Thursday evening in March. She was standing in the kitchen opening a bottle of Sauvignon Blanc, and she mentioned it as casually as if she were telling me about a dentist appointment. "Babe, I've got that industry conference in Austin next week. Big summit."
"Nexagen's hosting part of it. A lot of the major players will be there. Probably going to be gone five or six days. Maybe a week at most." I was at the kitchen table reviewing infectious disease surveillance reports from the previous quarter.
I looked up. "A week?" She was already pouring her wine. "Maybe a few extra days. You know how these things go."
"Networking, follow-up sessions. The company wants a strong presence." I nodded. "Okay. Send me your hotel details when you have them."
And that was that. She left the following Monday morning. She kissed me on the cheek, took her rolling suitcase and her laptop bag, and got in the Uber that was already waiting at the curb. I watched the car turn the corner from the front window and went back to work.
She did not come back in six days. She came back in 14. Fourteen days with a story that shifted slightly every time she told it. First, the conference ran long.
Then there were client meetings that couldn't be rescheduled. Then there was an internal planning session that Nexagen had set up to capitalize on everyone being in the same city. Then she decided to take a few extra days with some colleagues because the weather was beautiful, and they all needed a reset. I listened to all of it.
I asked calm, measured questions. I tracked the inconsistencies the same way I track gaps in disease surveillance data. Not confrontationally, but methodically. The hotel she originally mentioned had changed.
She switched hotels because of noise issues on day three, she told me. She sent me a photo of the new hotel's lobby from what I later confirmed was a Google Images result. The colleague dinners she described involved people whose names I recognized from her actual work circles. But when I casually mentioned one of those names, Craig from the Dallas office, she flinched for just a fraction of a second.
Not enough for a non-epidemiologist to catch, but I caught it. I knew. Not the full picture, but I knew. And then she came home.