Chapter 293: Date With Amara

’’Ask," he said.

She looked at him across the table and then did something he hadn’t expected.

She put her phone away.

"I had eight questions," she said. "I’m not going to use them."

He looked at her.

"You prepared eight questions and you’re not going to use them," he said.

"I prepared them for a version of this dinner where I was nervous," she said. "I’m not nervous. So the questions feel like a crutch now." She picked up her wine glass. "I’ll just talk to you instead."

"Okay," he said.

"Unless you wanted the questions," she said.

"No," he said.

"Good," she said. "The third one was a bit much anyway."

The food arrived.

She had pre-ordered, which he’d expected, and the waiter set dishes down without consulting either of them. She looked at the soup first. Tasted it. Set the spoon down.

"Too much salt," she said to the waiter. Simply.

"I apologize. I’ll have it corrected immediately."

"Thank you."

She looked at Sean while they waited and caught him watching her.

"You’re going to say something about the soup," she said.

"I wasn’t," he said.

"You had a thought," she said. "You did the thing where your expression stays neutral but your eyes change."

He looked at her.

"Max does it differently," she said. "His mouth gives him away first. Yours is the eyes."

"You’ve been reading me since I sat down," he said.

"I read everything," she said. "It’s a problem sometimes. I notice things people didn’t intend to show and then I’m not sure what to do with the information." She paused. "In hospital there was a lot of waiting and not much to do except watch people. You get good at it."

"How long were you in," he said.

"Long enough that I can tell when someone is about to deliver bad news from how they enter a room," she said. "Long enough that I reorganized the ward’s linen storage system twice and the nurses started leaving the cupboard unlocked for me." She said it without self-pity, just noting a fact. "Long enough that I wrote seventeen pages about healthcare policy gaps because I had seventeen pages worth of observations and nowhere to put them."

The corrected soup arrived.

She tasted it. "Better." Then to Sean: "I don’t enjoy being difficult. But I’ve learned that if something is wrong and you don’t say so, you sit with it longer than necessary." She picked up her spoon properly. "Two months of bad salt content would have been very bad for my patience."

"Were there other things you flagged," he said.

"Constantly," she said. "The ward’s visitor scheduling was inefficient. Their medication tracking system had a gap that I wrote a four-page memo about. The charge nurse told me the memo was the most comprehensive patient feedback she’d received in eleven years." She paused. "I think she meant it as a polite way of saying I was a lot."

"Were you," he said.

She considered this seriously. "Yes," she said. "But the medication gap was real and they fixed it, so."

He almost smiled.

She caught it. "What."

"Nothing," he said.

"You almost smiled," she said.

"The memo," he said.

"It needed to be written," she said. "There was a genuine problem." She looked at him. "You would have done the same thing."

"I would have," he said.

"I know," she said. "That’s why I said it." She ate some soup. "Max told me you built a documentation package for the federal case. Forty-three pages. I read the structure of it when he showed me the index."

"The structure," he said.

"I didn’t read the full thing," she said. "That would have been inappropriate. But the index showed the architecture of how you organized the evidence." She held her spoon. "You lead with the clean provable thing, use it to create the framework, then build the pattern evidence around it so by the time you reach the most serious material the reader has already accepted the premise." She looked at him. "That’s how you write a strong policy argument too."

"Is that how your seventeen pages are structured," he said.

"Twenty-nine now," she said. "The oversight body conversation made me add twelve more." She said it like it was a natural progression of events. "They asked three questions I hadn’t anticipated so I went home and addressed all three plus the six logical follow-ups those questions implied."

"You anticipated follow-up questions to their unanticipated questions," he said.

"I had two days before the second call," she said. "I used the time."

He looked at her.

She looked back.

"Max said you’d find me exhausting," she said.

"Max was wrong," said Sean.

"He’s wrong approximately thirty percent of the time," she said. "I’ve been tracking it since we were teenagers."

Sean set his fork down. "You’ve been keeping data on how often your brother is wrong."

"It started as a joke," she said. "We had an argument about something and I said I was going to start writing down every time he was wrong and he said go ahead because he thought I’d forget about it." She paused. "I didn’t forget about it."

"How long have you been tracking it," he said.

"Seven years," she said.

"Seven years," he said.

"The data is quite interesting," she said. "He’s wrong most often about people’s motivations, right about eighty-nine percent of factual matters, and has a specific blind spot around anything involving his own feelings which skews his accuracy downward significantly in personal conversations."

Sean looked at her for a long moment.

"What’s his accuracy on me," he said.

She tilted her head. "High," she said. "He said you were worth trusting. He said you did things because they needed doing rather than because of what doing them produced." She paused. "He also said you were eighteen and I’d probably have thoughts about that."

"Do you," he said.

She held his gaze. "I have observations," she said carefully. "I’m withholding judgment until I have sufficient data."

"How much data do you need," he said.