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  “Shared house payments are a great way to build a strong relationship. Everything else is secondary,” I retorted. But I kept my eyes on the phone and my butt in my chair near the whiteboard and Michelle.

  For a fourth time, the phone rang, then a fifth. Midway through the sixth ring, it cut off. I exhaled, only half-aware I'd been holding my breath. “It’s kicked over to voicemail. We can get back to work.”

  I turned back to the board, pushing myself out of my seat, and a shuddering groan echoed through the building. The lights, both the dim wall-mounted fixture on the near wall and the harsh halogen floor lamp in the corner, flickered and dimmed. A quick look into the hall told me that the same thing was happening in the entire office. All the lights on the phone flashed red once and went dead, and my monitor and desktop system abruptly shut down with a groan.

  “Brownout,” Michelle said, looking under the desk.

  “Hey!” I pushed my chair back and stood up. “What are you doing?”

  “Checking to see if your UPS sucks or you just forgot to plug it in.” She pulled her head back up. “Don’t worry, that’s all I’m looking at.”

  “Shelly—” I started, but broke off as the lights came back up. The computer rebooted with a ping, accompanied by the whine of an overstressed motherboard-mounted fan trying its best to catch up. The phone lights gave one final, desperate blink and then went out in unison.

  “Huh. The brownout must have eaten her message. Oh well, I’ll call her when we’re done.”

  Michelle nodded distractedly, then glanced back at my monitor. “Hey, that’s weird.”

  “What is?” I moved around to see, careful to maintain distance between myself and Michelle, who was still crouched half under the desk. After a moment, she uncoiled herself and stood up, about six inches too close for my comfort. I shuffled back, hoping she wouldn't notice.

  She pointed at the screen. There was the first screen of the presentation I'd started giving in the meeting room. “I guess it didn’t shut down completely. It’s open to slide number one.”

  “Impossible.” I leaned in for a closer look. “For one thing, I had the presentation open on the laptop,”—I paused to tap it, closed and hibernating on the opposite side of the desk—“not the desktop. For another, it did shut down all the way. We heard it stop and we heard it reboot. It should have gone to the login screen, not to Powerpoint.”

  Michelle looked at the monitor, a 36” flatscreen, then over at me, and then finally back again. “Huh,” she said. “Why do you even have two systems?”

  “Legacy. Eric likes keeping things old school. Doesn’t matter,” I said, a bit brusquely. “Now let’s finish this, so for once I can get out of here on time.”

  “Optimist,” she said and turned her attention back to the board. “So if we can keep this sequence to fifteen seconds, will that be enough time to show off the gameplay you want?”

  “Twenty-five seconds, minimum. And that’s if you want to do bare-bones, without any of the really cool route-mapping stuff that we’ve got in the UI.”

  “If it’s really cool, we want to show it. Twenty-five seconds then, and then another thirty-five for the combat.”

  A line was clearly being drawn in the sands of time there, and I was almost sensible enough not to cross it. “Thirty and forty-five,” I said, and then turned in surprise as the door to the office clicked shut.

  “There are other people trying to work,” said a muffled voice that was probably Eric’s and most definitely on the other side of the door. “Unless you two are finished?”

  “Just getting started,” Michelle yelled, loudly enough that I winced. “If you’re OK with that.”

  “Be my guest,” maybe-Eric said.

  Michelle turned to me and placed the dry-erase marker in my hand. “Shall we?” she asked.

  I nodded and moved over to the board. “We shall.”

  * * *

  Sarah’s car wasn’t in the driveway when I got home. In and of itself, this was not unusual. Sarah insisted on parking in the garage whenever possible, which was to say when the clutter from my side of the two-car space didn’t spill over into hers. So when I pulled in at six thirty, there was no real proof that I was the first one home. There was no light coming from inside the garage, but that didn’t tell me much. The internal lights only stayed on for two minutes after the garage door opened or closed, which meant that if Sarah had gotten home already, she’d gotten home a lot earlier than 6:28.

  I pulled into the driveway, a concrete slope that angled uphill at just enough of an angle to scrape the undercarriage of my Mazda if I pulled in or out too fast. Killing the engine, I sat there, waiting for the last notes of the Who’s “Eminence Front” to fade out before unplugging my iPhone and tucking it in my pocket. I always hated turning the thing on and getting the last few notes of a song. It did strange things to my momentum, or maybe I was just superstitious. Either way, now I made a point of letting the song run out before getting out. No musical leftovers—that was the rule—which meant that I’d sit there and just watch the house as long as necessary, in order to make sure I got to the end.

  The house was nice. It was a nice house, in a nice neighborhood, with nice furnishings and neighbors, and if I had my way we'd live there maybe five years at most before moving to someplace with a little more character. It had a brick facing, or at least most of one, a rarity that was becoming increasingly commonplace in the Raleigh area as more and more carpetbagger types moved down. The sides and back were masonite, painted a soothing shade of grayish-blue that made the house look older than it was. There was a full-height window facing the walk, courtesy of the landing at the top of the stairs; Sarah had hung up a foot-wide stained-glass piece in the shape of an Amish hex sign there the day we'd moved in. “For good luck,” she’d said.

  “I thought they were supposed to keep bad luck away,” I'd replied.

  “Same thing,” she’d told me, and then bounced off into the bedroom to make sure all the furniture there was situated appropriately. Not the same thing, I'd thought at the time, but I let it pass, and never mentioned it again.

  That exchange had been a little over a year ago. The hex sign still hung there, the bedroom furniture had been placed in accordance with both feng shui and Sarah’s steel-edged whims, and it was in all ways a most admirable and pleasant home to return to at the end of each day. This was true whether I was coming home at 6:00 (which never happened), 7:30 (more likely) or midnight, which happened more frequently than either of us liked to think about.

  The walk from the driveway to the door was short, angular, and lined with shrubs that required a great deal more pruning than they were worth. The actual lot the house was on wasn’t that much larger than the building itself, but it came pre-planted with a mix of highly aggressive bushes and Bradford pears to give the development an air of permanence. The dead-fish odor of the pear trees' many flowers still lingered in the air, with the last couple of blossoms hiding out in the thick leaves. Thin green shoots from the trees had started to poke up through the grass, I'd noticed, and for the umpteenth time I reminded myself to mow the lawn and do something about them. Saturday, I decided. If I’m not in the office, I'll do it Saturday.

  I managed to drop my iPod on the welcome mat when I reached for my keys. Calling myself all sorts of names, I stooped to pick them up, even as Sarah heard the clatter and yelled “It’s open.”

  “Thanks, honey.” A quick check told me the iPod was still working, so I tucked it away and wandered inside, into what smelled like the lobby at an Italian restaurant.

  “I’m in the kitchen,” Sarah called out as I shut the door.

  “I’m not,” I answered, dropping the laptop bag in the atrium at the foot of the steps.

  “I’m sorry I missed your call,” I added as I stepped into the kitchen. “We had a brownout just as the phone rang.”

  Sarah turned from where she stood, coaxing steam from a pot of what looked to be multicolored wheat pasta. �
��That’s all right. I just wanted to know when you’d be home, and I’d rather hear it in person than get a phone call at eight o’clock.”

  I leaned in and kissed her softly, mainly because I wanted to. She kissed me back, then returned her attention to the noodles. “Is that dinner I see in front of me?”

  “Nope,” she said with a smile. “This is for lunch for me for tomorrow. Pasta salad with sun-dried tomatoes, since I know you hate anything with vegetables in it. We,” and she turned and gestured with the wooden spoon for emphasis, “are going out for dinner, because I have news.”

  “No hints?” I asked, wandering over to the refrigerator and taking out a can of Diet Coke.

  “No hints,” she replied, “And no snacking. You’ll ruin dinner. And no caffeine. You’ll never sleep tonight”

  “Yes ma'am.” I popped open the lid of the can and wandered through the kitchen to the den. “How much longer is the pasta going to take? If I don’t spoil my dinner, I may resort to cannibalism.” Saying that, I threw myself down on the couch—black leather, the only piece of furniture I'd contributed to the domestic arrangement—and took the master remote from its place of honor on the coffee table. The television flared to life, even as the clanging of pots in the kitchen told me that it wasn’t actually going to be much longer. “Leon says hi, by the way.”

  “How’s he doing? We should invite him over some time. And where’s the colander?” Sarah’s voice was muffled, due in large part to the fact that her head was tucked into one of the kitchen cabinets. “I can’t find it anywhere.”

  “He’s doing fine, and it’s in the cabinet next to the dishwasher, inside the door,” I replied, and scrolled through the DVR. “My God, it’s all Say Yes To The Dress. What happened to my Walking Dead episodes?”

  “Overwritten, sweetheart,” replied Sarah in a tone that indicated that she didn’t regret this in the slightest. “There was a marathon, and you set it to record all episodes of Say Yes for me like a good and considerate boyfriend would, and the rest is history. Besides, Netflix or something, right?” There was more clanging, then the sound of a cabinet slamming and something metallic landing in the sink. As if on cue, the stove timer went off, bleeping with self-importance as I cringed at the wretched sound.

  “Do you need a hand in there,” I asked half-heartedly as I turned the television off. “Or would I be in the way?”

  “Just finish your soda and think about where you want to take me for dinner,” came the response, and then the slosh of water being spilled out of a pot. “You’ve got ten minutes to come up with something dazzling.”

  I took a long swig out of the can and swallowed a small burp as I set the thing down on a coaster. “If I’ve got ten minutes, I’ve got time to do research. I’ll be right back down with the golden ticket.”

  “As long as it’s not the Golden Corral,” Sarah’s voice called after me as I bounded out of the den and upstairs to my office. One of the attractions of the house had been the multiple bedrooms on the second floor, two of which had been converted into offices. Sarah’s was closer to the master bedroom, and with good reason; it was an actual office with an actual desk, filing cabinet, and so forth.

  Mine, on the other hand, was something different.

  I could hear the hum from my jacked-up Alienware gaming rig even before I opened the door, the blue light from the neon in the case lighting up the room as I entered. One wall was taken up with books, the other with games, and the floor held the papers that had yet to meander their way into the overloaded filing cabinet against the back wall. I'd hung up small but potent Altec Lansing speakers in each of the ceiling corners, while the desk and the desktop system dominated the space. No skimping on the chair, either—I'd gotten an ergonomic Herman Miller chair when one of the local middleware firms had gone belly-up.

  “How’s it going up there?” Sarah called as I opened up a web browser. “Just fine,” I answered. “Looking now.”

  My fingers worked feverishly on the keyboard. Just a quick email check, I told myself. Then I can find a restaurant.

  I hopped to Horseshoe’s remote mail server and logged in. There were twenty emails queued up, just in the few minutes since I'd left work. Some were spam, two were forwarded links to semi-humorous YouTube videos, and the rest were work-related from folks in the office who’d stayed even later than I had.

  One was from Leon. It said “Hah! When was the last time you went home first?” He'd attached a gleefully obscene image to go with the note. I deleted it and moved on. There were other emails that were a little more pressing.

  Where’s the design for the multiplayer matchmaking? I sent the link to where the docs were sitting Horseshoe’s internal server.

  QA’s saying that nobody’s getting past the chokepoint on mission 4. I sketched out the alternate routes, then suggested moving a couple of the enemy units thirty meters back so that the initial combat wasn’t quite as intense.

  Some of the hand-to-hand combat combinations weren’t flowing properly? That was a case of re-blending the animations, or maybe dropping certain combos that didn’t work together, and I promised all fifteen people cc'ed on the email that I'd get with everyone tomorrow on it.

  Sightlines on the first multiplayer map were too long? Put some crates in as placeholders and—

  “Ahem.”

  I jumped in my seat as Sarah leaned in and cleared her throat, not particularly quietly, less than an inch from my left ear. “Nice research.”

  I swiveled the chair around, hoping the blue light from the case would hide the red flush of embarrassment in my cheeks. No luck; I could see in the reflection in her glasses that I just looked purple instead. “I was waiting for the search results to load, and—”

  “And you decided to check work email, just in case the building caught on fire in the half an hour since you left it. Oh, and you accidentally closed the page with the restaurant listings on it, too.” She placed her hands on the chair and spun it back around so that I was facing the monitor. “Fortunately, I figured on something like this, so I already had a place picked out. Shut the computer down, put on a nicer shirt, and let’s go. Oh, and you’re driving.”

  “Yes ma’am,” I said, and did as I was told.

  * * *

  “And what will the lady be having?” asked the waiter, who looked more like a barista with delusions of grandeur than the sort of waitstaff that The Magnolia usually employed. He hovered attentively over Sarah’s shoulder, pad in hand and pen poised while I thought about glaring at him.

  “The lady,” Sarah said, “will be having the veal ossa bucco, and we’ll be having a bottle of the Gaja Barbaresco.” She set her menu down. “The 2001, if you please.”

  “Of course,” the man said, raising his eyes fractionally. “And the gentleman?”

  I scanned the menu, rejecting items sequentially as I came to them. “Chicken marsala,” I finally croaked out, more out of desperation and a deep desire not to get red sauce on my shirt than anything else.

  The waiter frowned, and I realized too late I’d picked a dish that wouldn’t compliment the Barbaresco. The hell with it, I thought. I was this close to ordering a Diet Coke anyway.

  “Will that be all?” the waiter added, turning back to Sarah. “We have some lovely antipasti, a superb selection of soups—”

  “That will be all, thank you,” she said, and raised her eyebrows to dare him to argue the point.

  “Of course.” The man backed away, bowing from the neck. “Your wine will be out shortly.”

  I watched him go. “Our wine will be out? What, is it tired of living the lie?”

  Sarah shushed me. “Be nice. The wine will be.”

  “I noticed.” I tapped the wine list. “That’s beyond nice. That’s positively saintly.”

  “That’s because we have something to celebrate.” Sarah smiled, and I immediately forgot about the waiter, the menu, and the price of the wine. Her smiles had that effect on me, particularly when she turned the fu
ll force of her attention my way.

  I smiled back and straightened up in my chair a little. “So, are you going to tell me? Or do I have to guess?”

  “When the wine gets here,” Sarah chided. “It’s the sort of thing you want to toast.”

  I nodded, then started ticking off guesses on my fingers anyway. “Let’s see. You’re drinking wine, so you’re not pregnant. You let me drive, which means you want to have more than one glass, so it’s really good news. I don’t see a ring—-”

  “That’s enough out of you,” she said firmly. “Besides, the wine is coming.”

  And it was, and the waiter, who re-introduced himself as Andy, expertly displayed the bottle before cutting away the foil and pulling the cork.

  “Sir?” Andy was waving a wineglass with a splash of red in the bottom under my nose. I fought the urge to throw myself backwards out of my chair and instead suggested that the lady was probably a better judge of such things. Andy nodded and passed the glass to Sarah. She glowered at me for an instant, then sipped, said “Excellent,” and held out her wineglass for more.

  “As you wish.” Andy filled her glass, then looked to me with an expression that suggested I'd be better off drinking something with a screw cap, or maybe from a trough. I just nodded at him, and after a moment's hesitation he filled the second glass before leaving post-haste.

  “So what is the big surprise,” I asked, and raised my glass. “We have the wine, we don’t have Andy—what more could I ask for?”

  Sarah smothered a laugh, and raised her glass to mine. The two touched, rim to rim, the sound of crystal on crystal so faint only the two of us could hear it. “Well,” she started, “for one thing, you are now looking at the newest senior account manager at Barnes, Derrick.”

  “That’s great! That’s fantastic!” I nearly went over the table to hug her, and I could feel how much of my face a grin was suddenly covering. “Honey, that’s wonderful. I am so proud of you.”