For a moment we did nothing except listen to each other breathe, me, frozen by indecision, and her, waiting for me.

I swallowed. If I did not ask, it would gnaw at me until I spoke to her again. It would be a stabbing pain whenever I thought of her, maybe even whenever I thought of grandmother, and I did not want what was normally a source of comfort tainted. I finally voiced my fear.

“Did you only start talking to me because you knew about my grandmother’s ability?”

She took her time replying. I fidgeted in her silence. It had only been a month, I had to remind myself. A month of potential delusion, when I had really needed someone to talk to, when it seemed she was interested in me and I thought—No, I can’t write it.

“I can’t say no,” she said finally. “You and I only met because of your grandmother. And who wouldn’t be curious about whether the power Meng told me about was real? And you know I had an interest in archiving. But maybe I can answer the question I think you are really trying to ask. Do I still talk to you only because of your grandmother’s ability? No, not at all. I like talking to you. I like you.”

I gave in then, mumbling something. When she asked me to repeat myself I couldn’t, because it was unintelligible even to me. She had said all I wanted to hear. Still, my view of her had shifted—from seeing her as open and eager to someone who was careful and calculated, who of course knew exactly what to say. Somehow, she had become both the only person I could talk to about grandmother’s illness and the only other person who knew about the pencils.

“This must be wild for you,” she said. “Maybe take some time to process? And if there’s anything that comes up later, just call me, okay? Let’s—” The genuine concern in her voice melted me further. “Let’s talk about your project. EMBRS, right?”

I had buried myself in EMBRS to distract from everything else going on, and it was easy to return to that now, the architecture I knew so well. I could lean against it with confidence and know it would never change unless I changed it myself.

I told her about our latest effort, to break ground on the journaling component of EMBRS. It meant not only building a slick website, but also processes that could operate on longform text instead of short social media posts. Different algorithms, brainstorming how best to store such data. It was silly, how much my body relaxed, talking about data and code. I told her about how Prof. Logan wanted me to prepare a presentation—and I probably went into too much detail about one of the natural language processing papers I was reading.

She began to laugh.