Chapter 64: Ross
He was up at five-thirty out of habit.
The food truck schedule had recalibrated his body clock in ways that felt permanent — the pre-dawn wakeup, the quiet of the city before it started, the specific quality of early morning light in a kitchen when you were the only one in it. He didn't fight it anymore. He made coffee, stood at the window with it, and watched the street.
Christie was on the couch.
He looked at her. She looked at him with the expression of someone who had made a decision and was prepared to defend it.
"I didn't want to risk it," she said.
"Risk what."
"You said you'd carry me if I couldn't get up."
"I said that as a figure of speech."
"You've never once used a figure of speech in your life."
He considered this. It was not entirely inaccurate. "Come eat something."
She followed him to the kitchen with the stiff movement of someone who had been sitting in one position for several hours and was not going to admit how uncomfortable that had been. He made eggs and toast. She ate without commentary, which for Christie meant she was nervous and managing it through stillness.
He ate across from her and didn't mention the nervous part.
[Cooking (Expert): 3/100]
Unchanged. His own cooking for himself and Christie apparently didn't move it the way service did. He filed this as information about how the panel worked — it tracked genuine challenge and genuine reception, not just execution.
Lily was outside the hotel at six-forty, eating a bodega sandwich with the practical efficiency of someone who had solved the breakfast problem without ceremony. She spotted Andrew first, raised a hand, then saw Christie beside him and stopped mid-chew.
Christie saw Lily and performed the rapid assessment she performed on everyone — a two-second inventory that she didn't bother disguising.
Lily swallowed her sandwich. "Is this the other one?"
"Lily, Christie. Christie, Lily." Andrew gestured between them. "Same year. You'll probably have overlapping classes."
They looked at each other with the specific evaluative quality of two people who were both good at reading people attempting to read each other simultaneously.
"How old are you?" Lily said.
"How old do I look?" Christie said.
"Nine, maybe ten."
"I'm ten." Christie's voice was entirely level. "How old are you?"
"Sixteen."
"And you're just starting at Hartwell."
Lily's eyes narrowed slightly. "And you're starting at ten."
"Top five hundred," Christie said. Not bragging — stating the relevant variable.
"Top nine hundred and forty-two," Lily said, matching her register exactly. "Forty percent tuition reduction."
Christie nodded. The accounting was clear. They had both arrived here by different routes and both had something to prove, and they had each identified this in the other in about forty-five seconds.
Andrew watched this and felt the particular satisfaction of having correctly predicted a dynamic.
"Can we walk?" Lily said, to Andrew, which meant she was done with the opening exchange and ready to move.
They walked.
After half a block Lily said to Christie, "The geometry subsection threw me. I barely held the score together on the back half."
"The trick is doing the angle problems first," Christie said. "They're faster than they look and they stabilize your time."
"I did the word problems first."
"Everyone does the word problems first. That's why the geometry section kills people."
A pause.
"Good to know for next time," Lily said.
They kept walking. Andrew was slightly behind them and entirely unnecessary, which was correct.
Hartwell's gate was busy at seven-fifteen — families, rolling luggage, the particular first-day atmosphere of controlled chaos that school administrations had managed since the beginning of school administrations. Andrew had visited once before with Christie, dealt with the enrollment paperwork, seen the dormitories. The school ran with the efficient thoroughness of an institution that had significant resources and understood that parents paid for reliability as much as education.
Christie's placement — top five hundred, age ten — had qualified her for the honors track. Two-person dormitory room, which the school assigned by academic standing. She'd be rooming with another honors-track student she hadn't met.
She stopped at the gate.
He stopped beside her. Lily had already moved ahead a few steps toward the entrance, then noticed and waited without making a production of it — another data point Andrew filed about her.
Christie looked at the building with the expression of someone conducting a final internal negotiation.
"It's just a building," Andrew said.
"You said that already."
"It was true the first time."
She picked up her bag. Adjusted the strap. Looked at him with an expression that was about six things at once — nervous, determined, grateful, unwilling to show any of it, aware that he could see all of it anyway.
"Summer," she said.
"Summer," he confirmed. Hartwell's first term ran through late June. He'd visit on parents' weekends, which she'd told him she didn't need and which he'd be attending anyway.
She turned and walked through the gate.
Lily fell into step beside her as they went — the loose, easy movement of someone who had decided this was going to be fine — and said something Andrew couldn't hear. Christie said something back. They went through the door together.
[Observation (Proficient): 68/100]
Andrew stood on the sidewalk until the door closed, then turned toward the subway.
Ross's building on the Upper West Side. Andrew took the stairs and knocked.
The door opened after a long pause.
Ross looked like himself but significantly worse — the specific deterioration of a person who had stopped performing maintenance because performance required an audience and he'd run out of reasons to have an audience. Stubble that had moved from deliberate to unmanaged. The sweater he was wearing had almost certainly been on for multiple days. His eyes had the hazy quality of someone who had been sleeping at the wrong times and not sleeping at the right ones.
"Andrew." He seemed to need a moment to place the visit in time. "Hey. Come in."
Andrew came in.
The apartment was its own statement. Ross was a fundamentally organized person — the apartment when things were good had the comfortable clutter of someone who owned a lot of books and fossils and treated both as furniture. This was different. This was the entropy of someone who had stopped making decisions about his physical environment because the larger decisions were consuming everything available.
Pizza boxes. Three. Stacked by the coffee table with the slight irony of someone who'd been maintaining that as a concession to order. Papers on the couch. The kitchen, visible from the living room, communicating things.
Andrew moved a journal off the armchair and sat down.
Ross dropped onto the couch and ran both hands through his hair, which had been through this maneuver enough times today that it had simply accepted its fate.
"Carol and Susan went to Vermont," he said. "Two weeks ago. She said they needed space to make the decision." He looked at his hands. "Which means the decision is already made, right? You don't need space to decide to stay."
Andrew didn't answer that directly, because the honest answer was yes, probably, and Ross already knew the honest answer.
"How are you sleeping?" Andrew said instead.
"Intermittently." Ross almost smiled. "I've been spending a lot of time at the museum. There's a Cretaceous exhibit I've been consulting on. It's—" He paused. "It helps to be useful somewhere."
This was actually the most functional thing Andrew had heard in the first three minutes, and he held onto it.
"My parents got me a lawyer," Ross said. "Divorce attorney. They called her before I did." He made a sound that was almost a laugh. "That's how I knew they'd already decided how this was going to go, even if I hadn't."
"Have you talked to her yet? The lawyer?"
"I have an appointment this afternoon." He looked at the middle distance. "Andrew, I've been trying to figure out when I stopped being the person Carol married and became the person she needed to leave, and I can't find it. I've gone back through the whole thing and I can't locate the — the moment."
Andrew looked at him. Ross was, underneath the current state of things, a genuinely good person — earnest in a way the world occasionally treated as a liability, loyal past the point where loyalty was strategically sensible, the kind of person who felt things at full volume and had never developed the protective irony that other people used to manage that.
"Ross." Andrew leaned forward. "I don't think there was a moment. I think Carol changed — genuinely changed, discovered something true about herself — and that's not something you could have prevented or caused. It happened to her, not because of you."
Ross was quiet.
"That doesn't make it less terrible," Andrew said. "But it's different from it being your fault."
"It doesn't feel different."
"I know. It will eventually."
Ross looked at the ceiling. "How do you know?"
"Because you're the kind of person who gets through things by understanding them, and you will eventually understand this one."
The doorbell rang.
Ross blinked. Looked at the door with mild confusion — the expression of someone who had not been expecting the world to have additional content today.
"Are you expecting someone?" Andrew said.
"No." Ross got up with the stiff movement of the long-sedentary and went to the intercom. "Yeah?"
A woman's voice, professional, slightly out of breath: "Mr. Geller? It's Elizabeth Tanner — your parents' attorney. I know we said this afternoon but I was in the neighborhood and thought—"
Ross looked at Andrew.
Andrew looked at Ross.
"Buzz her up," Andrew said.
Ross buzzed her up, then looked around the apartment with the expression of someone registering its current state for the first time through another person's eyes.
"I can—" he started.
"It's fine," Andrew said. "She's a divorce attorney. She's seen worse."
Ross ran a hand through his hair again, which accomplished nothing, and went to open the door.
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