The LDAP routing request finally got assigned.

Wrong team. System Engineering had it now. They'd kick it back in two weeks with a polite note about scope, probably, but at least it had moved off my queue.

Eleven tickets by noon. That was a good morning by any measure.

---

At lunch I ate at my desk.

Chicken bowl from the place on the corner. I had a ticket open about a shared drive permission error. Recursive group membership. The kind that takes about forty minutes if you do it right.

Amber texted while I was eating.

*How is your afternoon.*

That was new. Not logistics, not a where-are-you, not a what-time-are-you-home. Just contact.

*Chicken bowl. Permission error that's going to eat the afternoon.*

*The permission error is probably nested group inheritance.*

*Yes.*

*Fix the parent.*

*That's what I'm doing.*

*Good.*

Then nothing. I'd been going to fix the parent already. I knew that. She knew that. She'd texted anyway.

I ate the rest of the bowl.

---

She was there when I got home.

On the couch, in true form: crimson skin, white hair, wings folded behind her. Reading something on her phone. Her tail was looped around the corner cushion the way you'd loop a charging cable so it doesn't slide off the table.

I changed out of work clothes. Came back. Started dinner without asking what she wanted.

My knife technique still wasn't right. I was trying the motion she'd shown me a few weeks back, the rocking thing, blade down, fingers curled, and it felt wrong in my hand the way it had felt wrong every time since.

"The parsley," she said, without looking up.

I adjusted my grip. She went back to her phone.

---

Light did a thing.

I was reaching for the salt. The grain of light over the counter, the lower edge of the cabinet, moving — then not moving — then moving again. Not flicker. Not the parking-structure light coming through. The fixture over the counter, the regular one, doing something the regular one didn't do.

Three seconds. Then done.

I held the salt. Counter looked normal.

"Light just did a thing," I said.

"What kind of thing."

"Three seconds. Moving, then not moving."

She looked up from her phone. Looked at the kitchen light. Looked at me.

"Probably nothing," I said.

"Probably nothing."

I salted the pan.

---

I made dinner.

---

We watched something.

She told me what the show was doing wrong. She was usually right, and she was right tonight — the second character's whole arc had been wired backwards from the start, and once she pointed it out you couldn't unsee it.

Halfway through the second episode, something warm looped around my ankle.

Same place as always. Warm. Just there.

She said something about the secondary character's last scene that landed exactly where I'd been about to land myself, which was the part she did that I'd stopped trying to explain to anyone.

This was a Tuesday.

Her tail was on my ankle and I'd closed eleven tickets and she'd texted me at lunch for no reason.

For a Tuesday, that was enough.