"Now?" Garrett said again, mostly to buy himself a second he didn’t actually have a use for.
"If that’s okay. I’ll be quick. I just need to grab the laptop bag and my charger." She was already stepping back toward the stairwell. "Two minutes."
"Sure," he said. "Yeah."
She disappeared round the landing, and Garrett shut the door and turned to face the flat. He had, at most, ninety seconds.
He moved fast, without much of a plan beyond making it look like a person lives here who is not currently drowning. The trainer went into the wardrobe, along with an armful of clothes he didn’t have time to sort by cleanliness. The mugs went into the cabinet under the sink, door shut hard enough to rattle. He swept the takeaway cartons off the coffee table into a bin bag in one motion, tied it, and shoved it behind the sofa, which was less of a solution than a temporary relocation of the problem.
The post stayed where it was. There wasn’t a version of this where unopened bills read as tidy, so he left them stacked and hoped she wouldn’t look too closely. He took the deodorant sitting at the corner of his mirror, considered it, and used it anyway, three short bursts into the middle of the room like that was going to fix anything structural. He opened the window.
He stood in the doorway to the kitchen and looked at what remained. It wasn’t clean. It was concealed, which was a different thing, and he was aware of the difference even as he did it. But it would pass a glance, and a glance was probably all he was getting.
The knock came again.
She had a laptop bag over one shoulder now, charger cable wrapped loosely around her hand. "Thanks for this," she said, stepping past him into the flat. "Seriously. I owe you one."
"It’s fine," he said.
She looked around, briefly, the way people do when they’re being polite about not looking too hard. Her eyes moved over the room once, the open window, the faint chemical smell underneath it, and something in her expression flickered, just slightly, like she had clocked exactly what had happened here and decided not to say anything about it.
"You can sit there," Garrett said, nodding at the sofa. "Outlet’s behind it."
"Perfect." She settled in, plugged the charger into the wall, and opened the laptop. The screen lit her face in the low light. "Okay. Let’s see if I can get this thing to cooperate."
Garrett sat in the chair across from her, not entirely sure what to do with himself now that the emergency part was over. He thought about the objective.
CREATE GENUINE VALUE FOR ANOTHER PERSON.
This, he decided, was the right time. A person who needed something, in front of him, actively needing it. It didn’t get more literal than this.
"What’s the deadline for?" he asked.
She glanced up, mildly surprised he’d said anything at all. "Coursework. Data analysis module. Due at midnight, and I’m about forty percent done, so..." She pulled a face and went back to the screen.
"What’s the module actually about?"
"Statistics, mostly. Why?"
"No reason." He paused. "Need help with any of it?"
"I think I’m alright," she said, not looking up.
Garrett nodded. Fine. If she didn’t need help, he’d wait. A few minutes passed. She typed, stopped, scrolled back through something, then typed again. Garrett watched the screen from a distance without really understanding what he was looking at.
Then she stopped. "Come on." Garrett looked over. She clicked something twice, waited, then clicked it again.
"What’s wrong?"
"The file won’t open properly." She frowned at the screen. "It keeps saying the data source can’t be found."
Garrett leaned forward slightly. "Can I look?"
She hesitated, then turned the laptop a little toward him. He looked at the screen. It was, as far as he could tell, a collection of numbers designed specifically to make him regret asking.
"Do you know what it’s supposed to do?"
"Yes."
"Good."
She looked at him. He looked back.
"That’s probably useful."
She gave him a small, incredulous laugh. "You’re not actually going to help, are you?"
"I was considering it."
"You just said you don’t know statistics."
"I know."
"Then why are you looking at it like that?"
"Trying to intimidate the spreadsheet."
That got another laugh, quieter this time. She took the laptop back. "I’ll figure it out."
"Right."
Garrett sat back. Nothing happened. No notification, no progress marker. He glanced at his phone anyway. Still nothing. He frowned. Maybe he’d approached it wrong.
He got up and went to the kitchen. When he came back, he placed a glass of water beside her.
"Thanks," she said, glancing at it before returning to the screen.
"You’ve been staring at that for twenty minutes."
"That’s called coursework."
"Looks painful."
"It is."
He hovered for a second longer than the moment needed. "You want the window shut? Might be a bit cold."
"It’s fine."
"I could turn a lamp on if the light’s bad."
"The light’s fine, Garrett."
He nodded. "Right." He went back to the chair. The phone stayed silent. Garrett stared at it for a moment before putting it face down on his thigh.
Water hadn’t worked. The lamp hadn’t worked. Trying to fix something he didn’t understand hadn’t worked. Maybe the system wasn’t interested in effort. That thought lasted all of ten seconds before she spoke again.
"Wait." She leaned closer to the laptop. "I think I know what’s wrong." She clicked through two folders, opened another file, and frowned. "No. That’s not it." She tried again.
Garrett watched her for another few seconds. "What exactly is it looking for?"
"The original data file."
"Where was it saved?"
"Probably in Downloads."
"Then check there."
"I did."
"All of them?"
She paused. "What?"
"All the Downloads folders."
She looked at him. "There’s more than one?"
"Probably. Depends where you saved it."
She turned back to the laptop and opened another folder. A few seconds later, she stopped. "There." Garrett leaned forward. A file sat near the bottom of the list. She opened it, and the spreadsheet immediately loaded. She stared at the screen, then let out a breath that sounded like she’d been holding it for longer than she realized.
"That was it."
Garrett nodded. "You found it."
"I found it because you told me to look in the other folder."
"Still counts."
She looked at him for a second. "Thanks." It sounded genuine, not polite, not automatic. She actually meant it.
Garrett’s eyes dropped to his phone. Nothing. He waited another few seconds. Still nothing. That bothered him more than it should have. She’d had a problem, he’d helped her solve it, and she’d actually benefited from what he’d done. So why hadn’t the system reacted?
He looked at the glass of water sitting beside her.
Maybe that was the problem.
He’d been trying to make himself useful from the moment she’d walked through the door, but everything he’d done had been about getting the system to notice him. The water. The lamp. Even the spreadsheet. He’d been looking at her problems through the lens of a reward he hadn’t earned yet.
That realization made him uncomfortable.
He picked up the phone again. The screen remained stubbornly ordinary.
"So that’s not it," he muttered.
"What?"
Garrett looked up. "Nothing."
She watched him for another second before returning to her laptop. He put the phone away.
For the first time since she’d arrived, Garrett stopped looking for something else to do for her. He just sat there.
Maybe genuine value wasn’t about doing something. Maybe it wasn’t even about whether the other person benefited. Maybe the part he was missing was something he hadn’t considered yet.
Whatever the answer was, the system clearly wasn’t going to hand it to him.
And somehow, that made him want to figure it out even more.