I took your order. You can pay me back or not. I genuinely don't care. He opened the bag. The soup was from the place on Kfax.
It was exactly what he would have ordered. How did you know what I'd want? He asked. She looked at him like this was a very obvious question. I pay attention to you.
He made the mistake of looking at her directly when she said that. She made no move to soften it or laugh it off or give him an exit ramp. She just said it factually the way she'd said it before I pay attention to you. like it was the most natural thing to admit to a person. He looked at his soup. "Thank you," he said.
"You're welcome." They ate together, not talking constantly. There was stretches of easy quiet, the kind that doesn't need filling because the company itself is enough. She told him about a client consultation she'd had that morning, a couple renovating a historic bungalow, who kept disagreeing with each other about everything except the kitchen. And the way she described the dynamic was so precise and funny that he laughed twice before he'd finished half his soup.
He told her about Lily's ongoing T-ball practice report delivered nightly, which had recently expanded to include detailed strategic analysis of who on the team was reliable and who, in Lily's assessment, was going to need work. She's seven, Clare said. She is seven and she is already the most rigorous analyst I've ever encountered. She gets that from you. He looked up.
The precision. Clare said the way she breaks things down. She watches everything and then she processes it and then she reports her findings. She tilted her head. That's you.
I hope she has better social skills than me. Your social skills are fine. My social skills are functional. There's a difference. Clare pointed at him with her spoon.
That right there. That self-awareness. Also you. He shook his head, but he was smiling. And they both knew it.
And she smiled back. And the office was just an office, but for a moment, it felt like the most livable place he'd been in a long time. She left at 12:50 to get back to her own desk. At the door, she stopped, which was becoming a pattern. Clare was a woman who stopped at doors, who used threshold moments as punctuation.
"Ethan," she said. "Yeah, I need you to know something." He waited. what Daniel said on Friday. She turned to face him fully about you being a project about me fixing broken things. Her voice was level.