Chapter Twenty-Eight #2
Ryland cleared his throat. “I’ve come prepared,” he declared.
He set the sheaf of papers on the table beside his plate, squaring the edges against the wood with both hands.
“I read that structured questions reduce conversational entropy in unfamiliar group settings, particularly across generational and class divides.” He looked up.
“Both of which are present here. Colin is, after all, twelve years older than Diwa.”
Stephen inhaled his wine. His coughing was immediate and spectacular. Colin reached across and smacked his back with the flat of his palm, twice, firmly, while Stephen spluttered into his napkin and Diwa’s hand froze on the salt grinder.
“Right.” Colin withdrew his hand, picked up his knife and fork, and cut a piece of lamb. “Go on then, love.”
Ryland’s posture straightened. His hand moved to the top page, fingertip resting at the edge, ready.
Colin felt a surge of affection for him; Ryland had come to this table armed with research and good intentions, and Colin was going to sit here and answer every single question of his, because this was the alpha’s way of trying to help.
Ryland squared the top page against the table edge one final time, aligned his pen beside it, and looked up as though he were about to chair a board meeting.
“Question one.” He held up the sheet so everyone could see the numbered list, which ran to at least fifteen items. “On a scale of one to ten, how is everyone feeling about tonight? We’ll go around the table.
I’ll start.” He set the page down and placed his fingertip beside the number one.
“I’m at a seven. I was at a six earlier, but the lamb has improved my outlook. ”
Colin cut a piece of potato in half. “Six. It’s good to have my boys around me.”
“I’d rather be at a Welsh sheep farm right now, Ryland,” Stephen said, into his wine glass. Ryland’s pen moved. He wrote the response down in full.
“Ten,” Diwa said, brightly. “Ten out of ten.”
Stephen set his wine glass down and pinned the alpha under a glare. “You are not at a ten out of ten.”
“I am, though. I’m having a great time. The lamb is incredible, the Malbec is excellent, and I’m with you guys, which is —”
“Nobody is at a ten out of ten, Diwa. That’s not how the scale works.
A ten is a theoretical ceiling. It’s like saying the meal is flawless, the company is perfect, and nothing in your life could possibly improve, which is objectively untrue because you’ve been sweating through your shirt since you sat down. ”
Diwa’s hand went to his collar. “I’m not sweating.”
“You are. There’s a patch soaking through.”
Ryland tapped his pen against the table, twice, reclaiming the floor.
“Stephen, self-reported wellbeing scores are subjective by design. There is a well-documented tendency for respondents to inflate, particularly in social settings where they want to appear agreeable.” He glanced at Diwa.
“Which may be relevant here. But the methodology requires that we take each person’s score at face value.
If Diwa reports a ten, we record a ten.”
He wrote 10 beside Diwa’s name, drew a small bracket beside it, and added, in parentheses, a note that Colin couldn’t quite read but suspected said something like possible inflation.
“Right.” Ryland turned the page over and ran his finger down to question two. “Next. What is one thing you appreciate about the person sitting to your left?”
Stephen looked to his left, where Diwa was dabbing at his collar with his napkin, and the expression on his face could have curdled the gravy. Colin ate his potato and waited.
Stephen folded his arms across his chest. “Pass.”
“There’s no pass option,” Ryland said. “I didn’t build a pass option into the framework.”
“I’ve decided just now that there’s a pass option.”
“You can’t unilaterally and retroactively modify the methodology mid-session. That would compromise the data.”
“Ryland, we’re not gathering data, we’re having a family dinner!”
“Stephen.” Colin’s voice was mild, which was worse than if he’d shouted. “Answer the question, love.”
Stephen exhaled through his nose in a way that conveyed, to everyone at the table, that he was being subjected to a form of cruelty that the Geneva Convention would find inappropriate. His thumbnail rubbed against the edge of his napkin and began pleating it into careful folds.
“Fine.” He didn’t look at Diwa. His gaze stayed fixed on the gravy boat. “He doesn’t touch my dad first.”
The table went quiet.
“In the restaurant,” Stephen said. “And just now, when we came in. He doesn’t.
He waits. He always waits for Daddy to go to him.
I’ve been watching, and he hasn’t slipped up once.
” Stephen’s pleating had reached the corner of the napkin.
He folded it back the other way. “Most alphas are grabby. They just take. They put their arm round you or have their hand on your back, and they don’t think about it because they’ve never had to think about it. He does.”
Diwa had gone very still beside him.
“There,” Stephen said, to his wine glass. “Moving on.”
“I’m recording that verbatim,” Ryland said, his pen moving, and scratching along for quite a while. “That was substantially more detailed than a standard appreciation response. I’m marking it as an outlier.”
Colin’s eyes were bright over the rim of his wine glass, and he didn’t say a word.
They made it through three more rounds.
Ryland’s questions had a logic to them that Colin suspected came from the same place as his meal planners and his sourdough pH research; a genuine belief that if you got the inputs right, the outputs would follow.
Question three asked each person to name a skill they wished they had.
Ryland wanted to whistle with two fingers.
Stephen said he wished he could cook, which earned him a look from Colin that could have peeled wallpaper, because the boy had grown up watching Colin make a roast every Sunday and had retained absolutely nothing beyond the ability to open a tin.
Diwa said he wished he could fix things, and then caught himself, glancing sideways at Colin with his mouth half-open and his ears going pink.
“What is your happiest memory from childhood?” Ryland read from the page, his pen poised.
“Easy.” Diwa leaned back. “My grandmother’s house in Antipolo.
We’d go every summer, all the cousins, and she’d cook for three days straight.
There was this one dish, kare-kare, that took her an entire afternoon.
She’d send us out to buy the peanuts from the market and then make us shell them on the kitchen floor. ”
Ryland wrote. His pen moved to Stephen.
“Birthday Nandos.” He said it to the table.
“Every birthday, Dad took us to the Nandos on the A13. He saved up for it. We got a whole chicken between us and extra corn on the cob, and Dad let us have Cokes, which he almost never did because of our teeth.” He fiddled with his napkin.
“It took him ages to save up the money, but every year he managed. Sander and I still look forward to it now.” Stephen said.
Colin reached for Stephen’s knee under the table and squeezed once.
Ryland’s pen had stopped moving. He stared at what he’d written, blinked twice, and drew a small asterisk beside the entry.
They moved on. Question six asked about comfort foods, which devolved into a three-way disagreement about whether cheese on toast constituted cooking (Colin: yes; Stephen: barely; Diwa: absolutely not, there’s no thermal transformation of the protein matrix, at which point Stephen told him to shut up, but without any real heat behind it).
Question eight asked what they’d change about the world if they could, and Ryland answered first with “standardised international plug sockets,” delivered with such conviction that even Stephen couldn’t find a retort.
The lamb was down to bone and scraps by the time Ryland squared his final page against the table edge.
“Closing question.” He tapped his pen against his papers to emphasise this. “Updated ratings. Same one-to-ten scale. I’ll begin.” He set the pen tip against the page. “Ten.”
Colin looked at him. Ryland’s posture was as rigid as it had been at the start of the evening, his pen aligned precisely beside his plate, but his eyes had lost the careful blankness they usually carried in social settings.
“Ten,” Colin said.
“Still a ten,” Diwa said, with the exact same brightness he’d deployed two hours ago, as though the intervening rounds of emotional excavation had not touched him at all. His neck, however, was blotchy from the collar up.
Ryland’s pen moved to Stephen’s name. All three of them looked at him.
Stephen drained the last of his Malbec, set the glass down with a click, and folded his arms.
“Five.”
Ryland recorded it without comment, capped his pen, and squared the pages into a neat stack.