Chapter 7 #2
The mistakes have turned out to be useful too, which I did not anticipate.
When I double-booked his meetings last Monday, I could see the irritation in his posture before he even spoke, the particular tension that travels up through his shoulders, but he corrected me in six words and walked away.
No email to HR. No raised voice. No dressing-down.
I think it’s because he’s afraid that if he pushes too hard, I’ll come apart again like I did on the couch, and the image of him being careful with me, choosing restraint specifically because of me, does something to my chest that I try not to examine.
But the useful part is this: the correction means a minute in the same room—a minute where there’s an actual exchange, however clipped. I’ll take it.
This is the system. And what the system needs right now, the thing I’ve been turning over all week like a stone I keep picking up and putting back down, is one question.
Is he married?
I could ask Margaret on the twenty-seventh floor.
I could ask any of the three people I’ve managed to exchange small talk with in the elevator over the past two weeks.
It would take thirty seconds. But asking someone else about him feels like a different kind of intrusion than the one I’m already committing, and more than that, it would make him a subject of conversation rather than something I’m discovering one careful piece at a time.
I want the piece from him. I want it to be his to give me, even if he doesn’t know he’s giving it.
The problem is, I can’t ask if he’s married. There is no framing for that question that doesn’t make my intentions visible, and my intentions can’t be visible.
I’ve been workshopping alternatives since Monday. I’ve rehearsed them in the elevator, in the bathroom, in the back of my head during calls I should be paying more attention to. Each one has a different risk profile. Each one has a different angle of approach.
Tonight is my window.
He’s staying late, I heard him cancel something on a call this afternoon, the restrained-apology register he uses when he’s rearranging his evening, and I decide to stay too. I reorganize two things on my desk that don’t need reorganizing and wait for the floor to go quiet.
Seven fifteen. I lean into his doorway.
“I’m ordering Chinese. Do you want anything?”
He looks up from his screen. A beat. “Sure.”
One word. But I walk back to my desk with the energy of someone who just won something, because sure means yes and yes means I now know Patrick Aldera eats Chinese food, which is fact number three, and it also means I have a legitimate reason to be in the same room as him for the next forty minutes.
I pull up the restaurant app and order with the careful focus of someone planning a military operation, which is exactly what this is.
When the delivery arrives, I set everything up on the coffee table in the reception area. I knock on his door frame. He comes out, looks at the spread, and picks up a container.
“Thank you,” he says.
Two words. He says it like it’s nothing, and it lands like something, the way small things do when you’ve been waiting for them without admitting you were waiting. I busy myself with chopsticks so he can’t see my face.
We eat across the low table, him on the couch, me in the chair to the side. The city runs its evening forty floors below: signal lights cycling, office towers going gold in the windows across the street. The building has gone quiet enough that I can hear the air system in the ceiling.
He eats the way he does everything. Focused, unhurried, completely self-contained.
I eat and talk around the edges of things—the Marchetti contract, tomorrow’s schedule, something I read about a competitor that I mention mostly to see if he’ll correct me, which he does, efficiently, with two sentences that tell me more than I could have gotten from an hour of research.
I listen carefully and file it away, and ask one follow-up question, and he gives me four more sentences, which is practically a monologue by his standards.
I’m building toward the question the whole time. Looking for the natural opening. Watching for the gap.
It arrives the way gaps do, without ceremony.
The food’s mostly gone. The conversation has reached the bottom of the easy surface things.
We’ve run out of work to discuss and arrived somewhere quieter, the particular silence that’s not uncomfortable but is not comfortable enough that I should let it sit too long.
I open my mouth.
“Do you have company?”
The words come out, and I hear them hanging in the air, and they mean absolutely nothing. They have no context, no antecedent, no grammatical destination. They are a collection of English words arranged in an order that does not produce a coherent question.
Patrick looks at me.
It’s not the look of someone who’s offended. It’s the look of someone who is genuinely, patiently trying to locate my meaning on a map of possible human communication and finding no coordinates.
My face goes warm from the ears down. My brain goes into damage control.
“Like—” I gesture with the chopstick, which helps nothing.
“At home. You know. Company. Someone—” And here is where a competent person would stop, but I have never been a competent person in moments of active embarrassment, I become instead a person who keeps going.
“I just meant—I don’t know. Like plants? Do you have plants at home?”
A pause.
“No,” he says.
“Dogs? A dog?”
“No.”
The conversation ends there.
Not harshly. Not pointedly. It simply stops, the way a sentence stops when it’s over, and he sets his chopsticks down and looks at the remaining container.
I look somewhere near the bookshelf, and we finish eating like two colleagues who are absolutely not sitting in the wreckage of whatever that was.
I start clearing the containers, and I’m furious at myself. Quietly, internally, in the specific register of someone who had one job tonight and somehow turned it into a conversation about houseplants.
The question I actually needed to ask is still sitting exactly where I left it, unanswered, and instead, I have confirmed that Patrick Aldera does not own a dog. He does not own a plant. This is the intelligence I gathered. This is what I stayed late for.
I fold the takeout bag with more aggression than it deserves.
Although. No plants, no dogs. Who takes care of those things?
A partner does. A wife does. She waters the plant, she walks the dog, she’s the one who notices when the leaves go yellow.
His office has nothing personal on the walls, nothing on the shelves that reads as someone else’s life bleeding into his.
No second coffee cup, no extra jacket thrown over a chair, no evidence anywhere on this entire floor that a woman exists in his life and has opinions about it.
I’ve been watching for three weeks with the focus of a person who has absolutely nothing better to do, and the desk is clean, the shelves are clean, everything is precise and solitary and contained in a way that suggests a man who goes home to silence.
Or a man who goes home to a wife as cold as he is. That’s also possible. That’s the version I’m choosing not to think about.