Thursday I went to work.

Fourteen tickets in the queue. The LDAP routing request hit sixteen business days. I added a note that said nothing I hadn't already said. The printer was quiet. The quiet sat wrong, and I did not trust it.

At noon I went to the Korean place on 6th. Mia was working. She set the bulgogi down before I ordered, which meant she'd clocked me coming in and started the order, which meant my timing was mapped to inside two minutes on her side of the counter. I ate. She refilled the water once and the smile that came with the refill carried more than the refill required. I logged that too and did nothing with it.

Back at my desk by twelve-forty. At three-fifteen the printer expressed itself. Same rear feed. Same amber light. Manual correction, Resume, nine pages, parts-request note updated. Recurrence interval: 30.2 hours. The interval was holding.

---

Saturday I went to the gym.

Amber was not on the PT schedule. Travis was. I did my sets. The squat form held — her corrections were still in my body a week later, the way movement holds when it has been re-laid by somebody who knew what they were doing. I added a second working set because the rack was open. There was no reason not to.

I went home.

Saturday night I ate leftover rice on the couch. The cushion next to me was the cushion she'd sat on Wednesday. No visible mark. The foam had recovered. I knew where it was.

---

Sunday I did laundry. The mug she'd used was in the cabinet where I'd put it Thursday morning. Same brand as the others. I could not have picked it out of the lineup.

I checked the PeakForm app. Sunday schedule: Travis morning, nobody afternoon. Same as last week.

I had looked her up. Saturday night, on my laptop, because I am an IT professional and that is what we do when we can't sleep. Amber, personal trainer, PeakForm West Hollywood. Nothing. No social presence. No linked profile. She existed on the gym's PT schedule when she chose to be there and nowhere else.

I put the phone down and finished the laundry.

---

Monday. Marcus was at the coffee station at eleven.

"You look like a guy who's waiting for something."

"I'm getting coffee."

"You're getting coffee the way people get coffee when they're not thinking about coffee."

He was not wrong. I had been thinking about a woman who had been in my apartment twice and left both times and given me no way to find her.

"I'm fine."

He looked at me the way somebody looks at you when they have known you long enough to know you're full of shit and have decided not to make it a thing.

"Thursday. Drinks."

"Yeah."

He went back to finance. I went back to the LDAP ticket. Twenty-one business days.

---

Tuesday I went to the Korean place. Mia had the bulgogi going.

"Same thing?"

"You already started it."

"You're predictable."

I was predictable. Same place every Tuesday, same seat, same order. The pattern had been comfortable, and until ten days ago it had been the entire picture.

I ate. I tipped well. I walked back to Hartwell.

---

Wednesday I bought better coffee.

Not a specific brand. Not the brand she would want. I had no data on the brand she would want. The mediocre stuff had been the mediocre stuff for eight months and I had known it was mediocre the entire time and had not done anything about it. I was not going to run the question of why now was different from every other now.

I put it on the shelf. Same spot.

Wednesday evening the apartment was quiet. I made dinner. I ate it. No knock at the door.

The ceiling crack was still there.

---

Thursday I cleared eleven tickets. The printer jammed twice in the same hour and I cleared it both times without checking the screen because I already knew what it was going to say. At five-twelve I got on the Metro. At five-forty I got home.

I went to the Korean place for a late dinner because there was nothing in my kitchen that read as dinner. Home at seven-twenty. I put my bag down. I stood in the kitchen.

The good coffee was on the shelf. The apartment was clean. The couch, the window, the crack. Eight days since she had stood in this kitchen and told me I should be exhausted and was not. I was keeping count, which I had not decided to do. It was just running, the same way you notice when something that was in a room is no longer in the room.

She had no reason to come back. She had come twice. Once to feed, once to tell me what feeding meant and that something on my end had broken the math. Both times she had left before she had finished. She had said there was more. She could come back and deliver it whenever she wanted. She could also never come back. Both outcomes fit the data.

I stood in the kitchen for a while.

Then there was a knock at the door.