"Are you seeing someone?"
She says it in the break room, which is either brilliant or terrible timing depending on how you look at it — there are two other people at the far table, which means the question is in the context of normal human conversation, and there is nowhere for him to go.
He pours his coffee. "Where did that come from?"
"You've been different for about three weeks." She sits down with her own coffee. She is matter-of-fact about it, the way she is matter-of-fact about most things. "Specifically, you've smiled twice in the past ten days, which is roughly double your average. Also you left on time two Fridays in a row."
"Leaving on time isn't a symptom."
"For you it is."
He sits. He wraps his hands around the mug. He looks at Nadia, who is looking at him with the patient, complete attention she brings to everything.
"Someone," he says. "Maybe."
She does not make a sound. She does not do anything visible. But something in her face softens by a degree that she probably does not know is visible.
"Someone good?" she asks.
"Someone complicated."
"Complicated how? Complicated like her situation is complicated or complicated like—"
"Complicated like she pays attention to things." He drinks his coffee. "Like she is very good at her job and her job involves knowing things people don't tell her."
"A detective?"
"A journalist."
Nadia is quiet for a moment. "Hm."
"Yes."
"Is she—" She stops. She starts again differently. "Do you trust her?"
He thinks about this. He thinks about the coffee cup she kept. He thinks about the call about the three containers. He thinks about be careful, said in the tone of someone who already knows what they're being careful about.
"Not entirely," he says. "But enough."
"Is that enough enough?"
"I don't know." He looks at his coffee. "I haven't been good at this. Any of this. The—" He gestures vaguely, in the direction of the concept of other people. "I haven't been."
"I know." She is not unkind. She is just true. "But you're trying."
"I think so."
"That's actually most of it," she says. "Trying is most of it."
He looks at her. Nadia Cho, thirty-two years old, who brings him food and asks the questions no one else dares ask and sits in the break room at all hours because she is constitutionally incapable of leaving before a problem is solved, whether the problem is a medical case or a person she has decided is her friend.
"Thank you," he says. It is not a word he uses often.
She blinks. "Don't make it weird."
"I'm not."
"You're making the face that means you're going to be sincere in a way that makes me uncomfortable."
He drinks his coffee. He does not make the face again.
But he means it.