Caleb drove home with the meticulous precision of a man who was fighting the urge to drive his vehicle directly into a data center and shred every one of his own spreadsheets. His hand, which had reluctantly released Eliza's only when they reached the car, gripped the steering wheel so tightly his knuckles were white.
"The failure index is staggering," he muttered, not looking at her. "Loss of product, public embarrassment, and an unauthorized Core Asset Proximity Event witnessed by multiple high-value influencers. I have three pages of internal biometrics to debrief, Eliza."
Eliza, whose heart was still doing the cha-cha-cha against her ribs, knew exactly what he was avoiding: the fact that he hadn't been worried about the scones; he'd been worried about her. And then he'd looked at her like she was the only data point that mattered.
"We are not debriefing the emotional fallout, Vance," Eliza stated firmly. "The qualitative result was a success. Mr. Grump is tweeting about the 'offensively sad scone' and tagging us. That's pure, viral gold."
"Viral chaos is not structural stability!"
"Chaos is the structure of life!" Eliza shot back. "And you are trying to ignore the most interesting variable in this entire equation."
She reached into the pocket of her dress and pulled out the small, fuzzy, vibrant blue thread she had stolen from his trousers weeks ago. She dangled it between her fingers.
"The thread," she whispered. "Tell me where this came from, Caleb. Tell me the one thing you keep in your life that can't be measured, quantified, or optimized. You can't focus on the scone disaster until you fix the glaring hole in your personal data set."
Caleb's eyes flickered to the blue yarn. He pulled over abruptly to the side of the street, the sudden stop nearly sending Larry—who was strapped into the back seat, safely recovering from his mid-life crisis—into a spin.
He turned off the engine. The silence was heavier than any of his metric reports. He looked at the blue thread, and then slowly, reluctantly, he looked at Eliza. His face was stripped of its corporate rigidity, replaced by a deep, weary sadness.
"It's a piece of yarn from a blanket," he said, his voice barely audible. "My grandmother knit it for me when I was five."
Eliza waited, knowing there was more. She stayed silent, giving him the space that she knew his personality craved.
Caleb took a deep, shuddering breath. "My parents… they were economists. Everything in our lives was quantified. Time, affection, praise—it was all tied to performance metrics. If I got a B on a test, that represented a 4% failure in the educational asset allocation."
"Ouch," Eliza whispered.
"The blanket was the only thing that didn't come with an efficiency rating," Caleb continued, staring through the windshield. "It was lopsided, the stitches were inconsistent, and the blue yarn was cheap and snagged easily. It was objectively terrible knitting."
He finally looked at Eliza, a genuine, raw smile playing on his lips. "But she was terrible at math. So she couldn't measure it. And because she couldn't measure it, my parents ignored it. It was the only part of my childhood that was safe from optimization. It was just… warmth. And chaos."
He reached out and gently touched the blue yarn, now resting in Eliza's palm. "I kept one thread of it when I moved out. To remind myself that not everything needs a spreadsheet. That sometimes, the most valuable things are the ones that are objectively wrong."
Eliza's heart melted into a puddle of emotional data. She realized his obsession with order wasn't about being cold; it was about building a fortress to keep the cruel judgment of performance metrics out. He wasn't trying to optimize the world; he was trying to protect himself from the unquantifiable pain of his past.
"Caleb," she said softly, reaching out and covering his hand, which was still resting beneath the yarn. "You are not a failed asset. You are a man who loves his grandmother's lopsided blanket. That's a very high-value data point."
He looked down at their hands—his precise, large, strong hand, and her small, messy, paint-stained one—intertwined by the tiny blue thread. This time, he didn't pull away.
"When you touched my cheek yesterday, at the dock," Caleb confessed, his eyes intense. "My heart rate spiked, yes. But my data recorded zero panic. Zero flight response. It registered as a highly desirable, stabilizing metric."
Eliza gasped, her breath catching in her throat. "A stabilizing metric?"
"Affirmative," he whispered, leaning in closer, finally closing the dangerous proximity gap. The air in the car thickened with unspoken promises and the faint, sweet scent of yeast. "You are my emotional stabilizer, Eliza. The chaos I need to balance the rigidity."
He lowered his head, his gaze focused on her mouth, and she was sure, absolutely certain, that he was going to kiss her. This was the moment—the highly anticipated, statistically inevitable conclusion of their romantic subplot.
But just as their lips were about to meet, the laminated schedule taped to the dashboard, a schedule Caleb had entirely forgotten, caught his eye.
Caleb froze, eyes wide. "The 4:00 PM feed! Larry requires an immediate 1:1:1 ratio feed with 88-degree water, or his ENIFR could return! We are four minutes behind schedule!"
The spell was broken. Caleb instantly pulled away, turning the key in the ignition. The engine roared back to life, and they sped off, leaving the blue thread's profound emotional data behind them, replaced by the immediate, urgent needs of a demanding sourdough starter.
Eliza sank back into her seat, a frustrated groan escaping her lips. "The only thing you love more than data is that demanding jar of flour!"
Caleb drove on, looking straight ahead, but a small, satisfied smile touched the corner of his mouth. "Larry is a necessary buffer, Eliza. He ensures we maintain a professional distance from high-risk emotional mergers."
Caleb finally revealed his history, and they almost kissed—only to be thwarted by the one true obstacle in their relationship: Larry!