Chapter 22 — Raj's Blind Date
The Amanda Somme case settled on a Thursday afternoon.
The DA's office had reviewed the EDR data, reviewed the BMW documentation Priya had compiled, reviewed Dr. Feldman's expert summary on stress-induced motor memory override, and had a conversation with Martin that lasted forty minutes and ended with the prosecution agreeing to reduce the charge from second-degree murder to criminally negligent homicide. Amanda would serve eighteen months, with eligibility for early release at twelve.
It wasn't an acquittal. Martin had walked Amanda through that honestly — what the evidence supported, what a jury might or might not do with it, what the risk of trial looked like against the certainty of the reduced plea. Amanda had cried, then asked two sharp questions about the distinction between the charges, then said yes.
Eighteen months instead of fifteen years.
Martin had shaken the DA's hand, walked to the elevator, and stood in it alone for the thirty-second ride to the lobby, doing nothing.
Then he walked out onto the street, and the city hit him with its usual volume, and he allowed himself to feel good about the thing he'd just done for approximately the length of one city block.
Then he flagged a cab to Queens.
He heard the laughter before he got the apartment door open.
Inside, all four of them were arranged around the coffee table with Leonard's laptop open, which was unusual enough that Martin stopped in the doorway.
"Star Trek tickets?" he said, coming around to look.
On the screen were two adults who were clearly and unmistakably Indian, dressed with the particular care of people who'd prepared for a video call. They had the look of people who were very pleased with something.
Raj materialized at Martin's elbow with the speed of someone who'd been waiting for this exact moment.
"Martin, perfect timing." He put a hand on Martin's shoulder and steered him toward the laptop with the gentle insistence of a man executing a plan. "These are my parents. They've been wanting to meet you."
Martin looked at the screen. Looked at Raj. Looked at the screen.
Raj leaned in close enough that only Martin could hear him. "My parents want me to go on a blind date this weekend and I need moral support, please just be charming at them for five minutes."
Before Martin could fully process this request, Raj's father was already speaking.
"Mr. Scott! Finally. Rajesh speaks of you often. His mother and I have been hoping to meet the man who helped Priya find such an excellent position."
Martin sat down in front of the laptop, arranged his expression into the one he used for clients he genuinely liked, and said: "Mr. and Mrs. Koothrappali, the pleasure is entirely mine. You should know that Priya is one of the most capable people I've worked with — and I've worked with some exceptional people. Whatever you did to raise the two of them, I'd genuinely love to hear about it."
From the couch behind him, Howard said quietly to Leonard: "Is this the first time he's met them?"
"Apparently."
"He looks like he's been having Thanksgiving with them for a decade."
"I know," Leonard said. "It's unsettling and kind of incredible simultaneously."
Sheldon, without looking up from his phone: "Martin has always had this effect on authority figures and elders. It's been documented since elementary school. Mrs. Koothrappali is simply the most recent example."
The next eight minutes were, by any objective measure, a masterclass in making people feel that you found them specifically interesting. Martin asked about Hyderabad, where Raj's father had done his medical training. He asked Mrs. Koothrappali about the cultural adjustment when Raj and Priya had both moved to the States. He expressed genuine curiosity about whether the adjustment had been harder for the kids or the parents, which produced a ten-minute conversation that ended with both of Raj's parents visibly delighted.
By the time Raj's father signed off with a warm invitation for Martin to visit India and a promise involving a family recipe that had been in the Koothrappali household for three generations, Martin had apparently been provisionally adopted.
Raj closed the laptop and turned to Martin with the expression of a man who'd just watched someone do something he couldn't explain.
"How," Raj said.
"I pay attention to people," Martin said. "Tell me about the blind date."
The situation, as Raj explained it with escalating distress, was this:
His parents had given his contact information to the daughter of a family friend — a woman named Aarti, whom nobody in the room had met or seen a photograph of — and had arranged for them to meet this Saturday. The expectation, communicated via the particular parental pressure that required no explicit statement to be fully understood, was that Raj would attend, be charming, and allow the universe to do what the universe did.
The problem was the problem that had always been the problem.
Raj could not, in conditions of sobriety, speak to women he found attractive. This had been true for as long as anyone could remember. It was not a character flaw so much as a neurological situation — the presence of an attractive woman triggered a cascade of social anxiety that resulted in complete verbal shutdown, which Raj found as frustrating as everyone else did and which had, to date, resisted all conventional remedies.
"What are your options?" Martin said.
"Go and be silent and weird," Raj said. "Or don't go and disappoint my parents. Those are the options."
"Those aren't the only options."
"Name a third one."
"You could go somewhere you're comfortable, with people nearby who you trust, and see what happens." Martin looked at him. "The problem isn't the date. The problem is the setting. An unfamiliar restaurant, a stranger across the table, the full weight of parental expectation — that's maximum pressure. Minimum support."
Raj considered this. Penny, who had been listening from the kitchen doorway where she'd appeared approximately four minutes into the conversation, stepped fully into the room.
"Have it at the diner," she said.
Everyone looked at her.
"I work there. I'll be around. It's low-key, it's comfortable, it's not a candlelight-and-pressure situation." She looked at Raj. "And if it's going badly I can just be very present and give you conversational life rafts."
Raj looked at the middle distance. "I'll still freeze."
"Not necessarily," Penny said. She held up a glass from the counter — the remnants of the green cocktail she'd been experimenting with. "You've been talking to me for the last ten minutes."
Raj opened his mouth.
Then closed it.
Then looked at the glass in her hand.
"Oh," he said.
"The cocktail," Leonard said, sitting up straighter.
"This is the cocktail talking," Raj said, in a tone of profound discovery. "I've been talking to a woman I find—" He stopped. "I mean, not that I find you—"
"It's okay, Raj," Penny said. "I'm not offended."
"It's been working for the whole conversation," Raj said, still processing. "I didn't even notice."
"Because you weren't thinking about it," Martin said. He was watching this carefully. "That's the thing. The anxiety is about monitoring yourself. When you're not monitoring, you're fine."
Raj held up the green cocktail with the reverence of a man holding something holy.
"This is a magic potion," he said.
Martin leaned over to Penny and said, quietly: "I want to say something cautionary about relying on alcohol to manage social situations."
"I know," Penny said, equally quiet. "But it's one date. Let him have the moment."
Martin thought about it. "Fair enough."
"You could come," Penny said.
"And what, exactly, would that accomplish? Raj would spend the date watching me and Aarti would spend the date wondering why her blind date brought a friend in a suit."
Penny looked at him. "I just meant for moral support."
"I'll be moral support from here," Martin said. "Report back."
Saturday morning, Martin made coffee, opened a novel he'd been trying to finish for three weeks, and sat by the window in the particular peace of an apartment that had been loud all week and was currently empty.
They'd all gone — Penny to work her shift, Leonard and Howard as Raj's accompanying delegation (a decision Martin had some reservations about but chose not to voice), and Sheldon because Sheldon had decided he was interested in observing what he described as a controlled sociological experiment in culturally arranged romantic introduction.
Martin read forty pages, had a second coffee, and sat in the sun until his phone rang.
"That bad?" he said, without looking at the screen.
"Sheldon," Leonard's voice said, with the specific exhaustion of a man who had tried to prevent something and failed.
"What did he do?"
"He started talking to Aarti."
Martin set the book down. "Sheldon started talking to a woman. On his own initiative."
"He saw her and apparently she reminded him of a character from — I don't even — some mythology show he watched as a kid, and he just— he launched into this whole thing about her eyes and her— Martin, he compared her to a character who led a monkey army."
Martin pressed his lips together.
"It's not funny."
"It's a little funny."
"Raj is outside the diner doing breathing exercises."
"How's Aarti taking it?"
A pause. "She seems... entertained? Which somehow makes it worse because now Raj thinks Sheldon's approach worked and he wants to try it."
"What's Howard doing?"
"Howard is trying to explain to Penny that his previous failed attempts at conversation were a stylistic issue rather than a fundamental problem with his understanding of women."
"How's that going?"
"She served him decaf without telling him."
Martin closed his book entirely. "Tell Raj to come back inside. Tell Howard to stop talking. And tell Sheldon—" He thought about this. "Tell Sheldon the experiment has produced sufficient data and he can write up his findings later."
"What do I tell Raj? He's spiraling."
Martin thought for a moment. "Tell him something true. Tell him that Sheldon, who has the social instincts of a particularly focused academic, managed to have a natural conversation with a woman he'd never met because he was thinking about what interested him rather than about how he was being perceived." He paused. "The cocktail isn't the magic potion. Not monitoring yourself is the magic potion. Sheldon doesn't know how to monitor himself, which is usually a liability and was tonight an asset."
A long pause on the other end.
"That's actually helpful," Leonard said, sounding mildly surprised.
"I know. Go tell him."
"What about Howard?"
"Howard needs a different kind of help that I am not qualified to provide on a Saturday morning by phone." Martin picked his book back up. "Report back tonight."
He hung up.
Outside the window, Queens did its Saturday thing — the particular warm noise of a neighborhood that was neither asleep nor frantic, a city in a comfortable gear. Martin read another fifteen pages, then stopped and looked at the ceiling.
Somewhere in a Williamsburg diner, Raj was either rediscovering his ability to talk to women or having the worst afternoon of his month. Sheldon was almost certainly asking Aarti follow-up questions about the mythology in a way that was academically thorough and socially unprecedented. Howard was drinking decaf with the focused energy of a man who didn't know he was drinking decaf.
And Penny was behind the bar, managing all of it with the easy competence she applied to everything, which was one of the things about her that the rest of them consistently underestimated.
Martin's phone buzzed.
A text from Raj: She said she'd like to meet again. I talked for two hours. Two hours, Martin. I talked to a woman for two hours.
Then: Also I think Sheldon is getting her number for some kind of ongoing cultural exchange correspondence and I don't know how to feel about that.
Martin laughed to himself, genuinely, in the empty apartment.
He texted back: That's a win. Sheldon's correspondence is a separate issue. Celebrate the win.
He put the phone down and went back to his book.
That evening, they all came back loud and overlapping, filling the apartment with the specific energy of a group that had been through something together. The story got told in fragments and interruptions — Penny filling in the parts Leonard got wrong, Howard inserting context that nobody had asked for, Raj oscillating between pride and bewilderment.
Martin listened from the couch and let it wash over him.
This was the thing that the job, with all its late nights and impossible cases and the particular weight of other people's most difficult moments, sometimes made easy to forget — this specific noise, this apartment, these people and the uncomplicated warmth of being known by them.
He'd been twenty-three years old for four months.
He'd won two cases, built a client network that had taken most lawyers a decade to develop, found a gear selector that was going to change a woman's life, and watched his friends walk into a blind date situation that had produced, against all reasonable probability, a second date.
Not bad, he thought.
Not bad at all.
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