Cece was getting ready for an early agency meeting, standing in front of her bathroom mirror in a towel, when the thought caught up with her.
She was running through her morning checklist, portfolio, call sheet, the photographer she needed to follow up with, when the Robby-shaped corner of her mind snagged on something.
She’d been turning it over for days without giving it focus, the way a tongue worried a loose tooth.
And now, in the quiet of her own bathroom, the tooth came out.
He’d known about the Pollack side before the ancestry site confirmed it.
She’d been in the room when Winston pulled up the family tree, and Robby had been calm, not curious-calm, not worried-calm, but calm-calm.
The calm of a man who’d already processed the information.
She’d filed it at the time as good composure under pressure.
But the Pollack name had come out of nowhere.
It wasn’t a common name.
And he hadn’t asked a single clarifying question.
Then there was the moment at the dinner table, weeks ago, when Jess had mentioned her grandmother’s china pattern and Robby had known, without being told, that it was the same pattern her mother had.
A small thing.
A lucky guess, Jess had called it.
Cece had let it go at the table because everyone was laughing and the wine was flowing and it was a small thing.
But she started counting after that.
The recipe rotation: he’d named eleven dishes off the top of his head, and the list mapped exactly to the kind of food Jess had mentioned liking on their first date.
Not unusual by itself.
But he’d also known, without asking, that Schmidt’s kitchen had a specific brand of paprika in the third cabinet, the good Hungarian one Schmidt guarded like contraband and never labeled.
He’d reached for it like he’d lived there his whole life, opened the right drawer for the measuring spoons on the first try, in a kitchen he’d supposedly only cooked in a handful of times.
She’d been in that kitchen for three years and still opened the wrong drawer half the time.
The DNA test.
The way he’d suggested it on the first date, before Jess had even finished her coffee.
Before she’d had time to wonder about the connection herself.
Cece hadn’t been there, but she’d heard the story twice, from both of them, and each time a small, unexamined detail had lodged somewhere in her memory.
He’d known before there was anything to know.
She tried to dismiss it.
People had lucky streaks; her own mother had a sixth sense about restaurant orders, always picking the best dish without reading the menu, a trick she’d once explained by saying she “watched what the waiters looked nervous about.” It wasn’t magic, just observation, the small accumulative competence of someone who paid attention, and Robby paid attention, that was his whole thing.
The knowing was a feature, not a glitch.
She’d told Jess as much herself, back when Jess was the one worried it was too good to be true.
Funny, now, that she was the one holding the worry instead.
She said it out loud to her reflection, half a laugh in her own voice.
“You’re building a conspiracy theory about your best friend’s boyfriend in a towel.
Get dressed.”
Her reflection didn’t argue.
Neither did the thought.
She reached for her portfolio bag, checked it twice for the prints she needed, and caught herself doing the math again anyway.
Small things, meaningless alone, that kept refusing to disappear together.
But the DNA test wasn’t observation.
There was nothing to observe before he’d even walked into that coffee shop; he couldn’t have read the Pollack connection off Jess’s mannerisms, because the name hadn’t come up yet, he’d raised it before she could.
That wasn’t pattern recognition.
That was something else, and not having a word for the something else bothered her more than the pattern itself.
She set her brush down and looked at her own reflection.
The cooling between them, the one playing out right now across the loft’s dinners and careful conversations, had started after Robby had pre-empted one of Jess’s worries and gotten it wrong for the first time.
Before that, his guesses had been uncannily accurate.
After, the accuracy stopped and the distance began.
As if the source of his knowing had been interrupted, and without it, he was ordinary.
She shook her head and reached for her mascara.
Maybe she was building a case out of nothing, the kind of pattern a protective brain assembled when it went looking for one.
But the shape held anyway: he knew things he shouldn’t, too consistent for luck, too specific for intuition, and when the knowing stopped, everything else had stopped with it.
Her phone buzzed: the agency photographer confirming their meeting time.
Ten a.m., don’t be late, I have a client at eleven.
She typed back a quick on my way in twenty and felt the familiar pressure of her own life pulling her away from the thought.
She had a business to build, clients to impress, a career that required every ounce of her focus.
She didn’t have the bandwidth to run an investigation into her best friend’s boyfriend based on a feeling and a list of coincidences.
She finished her makeup.
Dressed.
Tucked the thought into the drawer where she kept things she’d examine later, when she had room.
But the drawer didn’t lock.
She caught a glimpse of Robby later that week, across the loft’s living room, laughing at something Winston had said.
The laugh looked ordinary.
He looked ordinary.
A nice guy who liked Jess and was trying to fit in with her friends.
Everything about the scene was warm, normal, the kind of moment Cece would have trusted without a second thought a month ago.
Except she’d started counting.
And the count had a shape.
“You’re staring,” Winston said, catching her eye across the room.
“I’m thinking.”
“About?”
“Portfolio stuff.
Agency things.”
“You have a very specific face for agency things.
It’s your Robby face.”
“I don’t have a Robby face.”
“You do.
You’ve had it for a week.
I catalog faces, Cece.
It’s a skill.”
“Fine.
What does the Robby face look like, according to your catalog?”
“Squinting.
Like you’re doing long division in your head and the answer keeps coming out wrong.”
“That’s oddly specific.”
“I notice things.
It’s why the tracker works.”
“The tracker tracks recipes and cat opinions, Winston.
It’s not exactly forensic.”
“Don’t underestimate the tracker.
The tracker sees all.”
“Does it see Robby?”
The question came out before she’d fully decided to ask it, lighter than she meant it, testing the water without committing to the dive.
Winston tilted his head, considering the cat instead of her.
“Robby’s a green cell.
Steady deposits, no red flags.
Why?”
“No reason.
Just wondering if the spreadsheet’s noticed anything I haven’t.”
“The spreadsheet notices everything.
That’s the whole point of a spreadsheet.”
“Comforting.”
“It’s meant to be.”
“For what it’s worth,” Winston added, scratching behind Furguson’s ear, “the cat likes him.
Furguson doesn’t fake that.”
“Furguson also likes tinfoil.”
“Furguson has discerning and undiscerning tastes simultaneously.
It’s a nuanced position.”
She let that sit for a second, wondering, not for the first time, whether Winston’s spreadsheet had picked up on something she hadn’t named yet either.
She decided not to ask.
Some questions were better left un-invited into a Tuesday afternoon.
She didn’t confront him.
She didn’t mention it to Jess.
What was there to say.
I think your boyfriend knew about your family tree before you did, based on a feeling I had in a bathroom mirror?
It was the kind of accusation that made the accuser look paranoid, not the target look guilty.
And Jess was in a fragile enough place already, the distance between them still fresh, the cooling still unresolved.
Cece wouldn’t add weight to that scale without something heavier than a hunch.
So she filed it under “watch” and let the agency meeting pull her out the door.
But as she walked past him toward the stairs, she noticed, just for a moment, that his eyes met hers with a flicker of something that might have been awareness.
As if he knew, on some level, that she’d started seeing him differently.
“Big meeting?” he asked, stepping aside to let her by.
“Big-ish.
Wish me luck.”
“Luck.”
“Thanks.”
“You’ve got the face people make before something goes well.”
“How would you know what that face looks like?”
“I pay attention.”
“You always say that.
Like it’s a whole personality.”
“It’s a decent one to have.”
“Most people who say that aren’t actually that good at it.”
“I’m not most people.”
“Careful.
Statements like that are how spreadsheets get started about people.”
“Winston already has a column for me.
Green cell, if it helps.”
“It does not, actually.”
“Didn’t think it would.”
A month ago, that line would have been charming.
Today it landed closer to evidence.
She almost laughed at that, the sheer nerve of the phrase landing in her ears differently than it would have a week ago.
“Yeah,” she said.
“You do.”
“Go.
You’ll be late.”
“I know.
Wish me luck again, for good measure.”
“Luck.
Twice now.
Don’t spend it all in one meeting.”
Then the moment passed, and he was just Robby again, and she was late for her meeting, and the thought was pushed to the drawer where it would sit for weeks, dormant but alive, waiting for the next coincidence to give it a little more shape.