Page 3 of Angel of Thursdays

“You would know if I were.”

“Well, yeah, I would. I told her that.” She picked up a loupe, looked through it at nothing, placed it back in the wrong quadrant, because of course she did, she’d already disrupted the Zone. “What happened with the last one? The date?”

A bar in a converted loft with exposed brick and poor acoustics. The man across from him had asked three questions and answered all three himself before Cassiel could open his mouth. Forty-two minutes of his life he could have spent on a video about an old Nickelodeon sweepstakes.

“It didn’t work out,” he said.

“Wow, the detail, it’s like I was there. Thank you. But I had an idea.”

She put her phone between them, the screen showing a minimalistic landing page for some app.

“What if,” Lauren began, “you did have someone. Just for Korean Thanksgiving.”

“Don’t call it that.”

“What? It’s⁠—”

“It’s Chuseok.”

“Focus.” She tapped the screen with her manicured nail. Bright orange with a navy lightning bolt nail art. Fresh.

The app’s logo read STDY, which Cassiel guessed was STUDY with the vowel removed, though perhaps STEADY made more sense given the context.

“You bring someone. A hired professional. Your mom sees you with a date, everyone calms down, you eat your pancake things in peace.”

She’d used it herself, she explained, after one of the breakups. Cassiel did not recall which. Every man she’d ever dated was, as far as he could determine, the same person in slightly different jeans. He’d told her this once, and she’d ignored him, and then three days later called him and said, “The jeans never fucking FIT.”

“The point is it works. Show up with someone presentable, normal, your mom sees you thriving⁠—”

“I’m thriving now,” he said.

“You eat the same lunch every day.”

Cassiel looked up at her. What thriving had to do with his lunch was beyond him.

“Because I found the good one,” he said.

Lauren’s solution was hers alone, because her problems were about legibility. She needed to be seen doing well. But Cassiel suspected what his mother wanted was a son whose life proved that the solitude was just his personality, not symptoms of something else that had calcified around him while she watched helplessly from Fremont. The indoor job, repairing watches while ignoring the world, the apartment on 4th Avenue with no one else in it. No hired date would change the underlying problem.

But something about Lauren’s idea was lingering. Someone whose job it was to be there and not because they wanted to, which was the miserable honesty of it, and its only mercy. Patience as a contractual term.

“I’ll think about it.”

Lauren squinted. “I was ready for a shutdown.”

“It might be a shutdown,” he said.

She smirked and picked up her phone with satisfaction that the conversation had not earned. She pivoted to a different message from the ongoing ex situation, or possibly a different man whose name Cassiel had chosen not to retain. There was no way to tell.

He turned off his brain and ears and started tidying the Demilitarized Ass Zone around her.

* * *

The rate wandered when he stood the watch on its side. He’d heard it before the timegrapher confirmed it, a drag in the Seamaster’s swing that surfaced crown-up, vanished dial-down. Hairspring bent at the outer coil. Not enough to stop the movement, just enough to push the balance off-center in the jewel. The watch ran. That was not good enough.

Cassiel’s desk lamp threw a clean 5000K across the work surface—daylight, high CRI, one correct thing about the shop’s lighting.

The coil cooperated on the third pass. He set the tweezers down, fitted the balance cock, then placed the movement on the timegrapher. Lines drew across the screen—amplitude recovering, rate settling, beat error within spec. He watched them longer than required because the correction had been good and the lines were clean and there was no reason to stop looking at something that was good and correct.