CHAPTER 6: Small Things

I had prepared a document.

Twelve pages. Organized by category — family background, professional history, personal preferences, social habits, notable relationships, political and dietary considerations. Everything a person in my position needed to know about the woman they were about to present to their family as the love of their life.

I slid it across the dining table at seven-thirty Thursday evening, two coffees between us, the city darkening outside the windows.

Sophia looked at it.

Then she looked at me.

"You made a spreadsheet," she said.

"A document. There's a difference."

"There are tabs."

"Organization isn't—"

"Nathan." It was the first time she had used my name without a title attached to it. Neither of us acknowledged it, but it landed differently than I expected — familiar in a way that caught me slightly off-balance. "I'm not a quarterly report."

"I know that."

"Do you?"

I held her gaze. "I know that the assessors will ask my mother questions she will answer honestly. I know that Marcus will spend Saturday looking for inconsistencies. I know that the single most common way people are identified as fraudulent couples is through contradictions in small details." I paused. "So yes. I made a document."

She was quiet for a moment. Then she pulled it toward her and began reading.

I watched her face as she worked through the first tab — Biographical Overview — her expression moving through several things I couldn't quite name. She stopped at one line. Read it twice.

"You listed my GPA," she said.

"It was in the university records."

"You pulled my university records."

"I pull records on everyone I enter into a significant agreement with."

She set the document down. Looked at me with an expression that was not quite anger and not quite something else. "That feels like a violation."

"It's standard due diligence."

"It's personal."

"You're living in my apartment."

"Because you bought me." Her voice was even, but the word landed hard — the way she sometimes used precise language like a scalpel, cutting to the thing neither of us wanted to say plainly. Then she exhaled. Picked the document back up. "Fine. What do you want to know first?"

"What you told your friends about where you're going."

She blinked. "That's what you lead with?"

"It's the most immediate vulnerability. If someone at Saturday's dinner knows someone who knows your social circle, the story needs to be consistent before Saturday, not after."

She considered this. "I told them I was getting married. That it was fast. That I'd explain later."

"Did they believe you?"

"My friends know my father." She turned a page. "They believed it was complicated. They didn't push."

I noted that down. "And your mother?"

Something shifted in her face — small and fast, the way pain moves when someone has learned to control the display of it.

"She died when I was fourteen," she said. Simply. Like a fact she had long finished grieving, or like she was still in the middle of it and had simply gotten very good at covering the distance.

I stopped writing.

"I'm sorry," I said. And I meant it — not as formality, but as the specific recognition of a specific loss. I knew what it was to grow up in a house where one parent's absence defined everything the remaining one became.

She looked at me. Surprised, maybe, by the tone.

"What about yours?" she asked.

"My father died when I was nineteen. Heart attack." I set the pen down. "My mother remarried within two years. His name is Richard. He's decent enough. They winter in Lisbon."

"Do you like him?"

"I respect him."

"That's not the same thing."

"No," I agreed. "It isn't."

We stayed with that for a moment — two people on opposite sides of a marble table, discovering the particular gravity of shared losses. It was not a comfortable silence. It was something more than that.

"Coffee order," Sophia said, refocusing. "You take it black. No sugar. You reset the machine when it hasn't been used for more than four hours, which means you must drink it precisely twice a day or you'd never bother."

I stared at her. "You've been observing me."

"I told you I would." She was not apologetic about it. "Your turn."

I thought for a moment. "You read when you're anxious. Not to escape — to anchor yourself. The book is always face-down on the table when you're in the middle of a conversation you don't want to have. You've done it three times since Monday."

She went very still.

"That's — " She stopped. Started again. "That's accurate."

"I observe too," I said. "I just don't announce it."

Something changed in her expression then. The careful composure she maintained like architecture — always present, always load-bearing — shifted slightly, like a door opening an inch.

"We should practice," she said quietly.

"What specifically?"

"How we stand together. In public." She stood, moved around the table, and stopped beside me. Close — not inappropriately, but with the deliberate proximity of someone who had decided to stop pretending the exercise wasn't necessary. "At the dinner, you'll need to look like you're aware of where I am in the room at all times."

"I can manage that."

"And when we're standing together—" She glanced at my hand, then back up at me. "It can't look rehearsed."

I understood what she was asking. I stood and positioned myself beside her, the way I would at any event — my hand moving to the small of her back, light, appropriate, the universal language of this person is mine.

She went still.

Not rigidly. Not with discomfort. Just — still. The way a room goes quiet before something important.

I didn't move my hand.

Neither of us spoke.

Outside, the city continued its indifferent noise. Inside, eleven years of solitude seemed suddenly very loud.

"That works," she said finally. Her voice was steady. Practiced.

"Yes," I said.

She stepped forward — breaking the contact — and moved back around the table to her chair. Picked up her coffee. Turned a page of the document.

"I hate mushrooms," she said, as if nothing had happened. "In case there are mushrooms Saturday."

"I'll have the menu reviewed."

"And I laugh when I'm nervous. Not a lot. Just — a small laugh. At the wrong moment." She looked up at me over the rim of her cup. "Don't be surprised by it."

"I won't be."

She nodded. Looked back down.

And I stood by the window, city lights spreading below us like something infinite, and noticed that my hand was still slightly raised at my side — exactly where her back had been.

I lowered it carefully.

As if no one was watching.

As if that was even the problem.