All the curtains were drawn, but Sam could see a light on in the room he knew to be her bedroom. She was home.
“SADIE!” he called again.
Several minutes later, she came to the door, looking like herself, but very pregnant and very pale.
“What?” she said.
“May I come in?”
She swung the door open, barely wide enough for Sam to enter, and the house seemed airless, and distantly he could smell fresh paint.
“Are you painting?” Sam asked.
“Alice,” Sadie said. “The room for the parasite.”
She led him into the living room. The room wasn’t dirty, but the houseplants had been neglected.
“So?” she said. “You’re here.”
“The Revels Ex team needs to know what to do for the expansion pack,” Sam said.
“I said I’d call them,” Sadie said.
“If we don’t have it on the market this year, we’ll have to upgrade the engine, because the tech will have lagged behind the—”
Sadie interrupted him. “I know how games work, Sam.”
“It would be good if the work were finished before your due date.”
“Yes.”
“Do you want me to put someone else on it? You could tell me the broad strokes, and I could oversee it.”
“It’s my game, Sam. I’ll finish the expansion pack.”
“Yes, but everyone would understand. Under the circumstances.”
“You’d love that, wouldn’t you? Put your fingerprints all over my work. Find more ways to call it your game.”
“Sadie, that is not what this is about. I want to help you.”
“If you wanted to help me, you’d leave me alone.”
“I’d positively love to leave you alone, but someone has to run our company.”
Sadie pulled her hands into the arms of her sweater. “Why?” Sadie said. “Why do we have to do any of this?”
“For God’s sake. Because it’s our company.” Sam stood up, and he almost thought he would collapse, the ghost foot beating like a heart. But instead of sitting down, or mentioning the discomfort he was in, he let the pain and lack of sleep power his rage. “I am so tired of your crap. Do you honestly think you suffer more than everyone else? Do you think you suffer more than I do? Do you think you’re the first person to ever have a baby? Or lose someone? Do you think you’re some goddamned pioneer when it comes to grief?”
Sadie shifted forward, and he could feel the momentum of their argument. He could feel the cruel thing she was about to say in response to the cruel thing he had said. But the cruel thing did not arrive. Disturbingly, she slumped forward, and started to weep.
He watched her, but he did not go over to her. “Snap out of it, Sadie. Come to the office. We work through our pain. That’s what we do. We put the pain into the work, and the work becomes better. But you have to participate. You have to talk to me. You can’t ignore me and our company and everything that came before. Everything isn’t over because Marx is dead.”
“I can’t go back there, Sam.”
“Then you’re weaker than I thought,” Sam said.
The sun was going down, and the air had turned abruptly cold in the way L.A. beach towns can. “In truth,” she said in a low voice, “you’ve always made too much of me.”
Sam walked toward the door. “Come in. Don’t come in. I don’t care how you do it. Just get the work done on Revels. It’s your game. You wanted to make it so much that you were willing to end our relationship, if you can remember anything that happened before last December. You owe it to me, to Marx, to yourself. You owe it to the game, Sadie.”
“Sam,” she called as he reached the door. “Please don’t come here again.”
She did not ever admit he was right nor did she speak to Sam, except through the occasional strained text. She did not once go into the office, though she did have an extra computer moved into her house. She spoke to Mori regularly, and Mori reported to Sam that Sadie did a great deal of the work herself. Somehow, Master of the Revels: The Scottish Expansion was completed a week before she gave birth, and the expansion pack was released on schedule.
Sam heard the game was good, but he didn’t know firsthand. It would be many months before he could bring himself to play it.
4
Naomi Watanabe Green was born in July. She, like the game her mother had been working on, arrived exactly on time.
Sam didn’t know if Sadie wanted him to visit, and he had always been bad at going places where he was not certain he was wanted. Besides, he did not particularly want to meet this baby. He feared babies in general—their immaculateness was threatening to him. With this one in particular, he dreaded finding Marx’s face in it.
You should go meet this baby, imaginary Marx admonished him. Trust me on this.
But Sam did not take his advice.
Still, he did what he could for Sadie. He went to work, even when he didn’t want to, even when he was in pain. He called Alice, whom he disliked, to see how Sadie was. He drove past her house to make sure her lights were on, but he kept his distance because that was what she had asked. Maybe it wasn’t enough, but it was what he could do.
5
On the day debugging was finished on Counterpart High: Senior Year, Simon announced to Sam, “The occasion demands a party, Mazer.”
Sam admitted that it had not even occurred to him to have a party.
“You’re kidding, right? God, I miss Marx. Hmm, why throw a party? I don’t know, we finished the game. We survived the last year. They tried to kill us, they nearly broke us, but we’re still bloody here! Why does anyone ever throw a party?”
Parties, like many other things, had fallen largely under Marx’s purview, and Sam had never thrown one before. Marx’s advice was to hire a party planner: For God’s sake, Sam, you don’t have to do everything yourself.
Since Counterpart High ended in a graduation ceremony, the party planner’s idea was Grad Night. Guests could wear caps and gowns, or clothes from when they went to high school. A secret room for alcohol and spiked punch. A photo booth. A yearbook signing table. Sam thought it sounded jejune. “People love being jejune,” the party planner assured him.
Sam had invited Sadie, though he knew she would not come. She was, according to Alice, overwhelmed. “She has a pretty good case of postpartum depression going, I’d say. And that’s on top of the depression she already had,” Alice said. He still had the impulse to go to her house every day, like he had done when they’d been in college. But Sadie was an adult, with a child. And Sam was an adult, with a business to run, mostly by himself.
* * *
—
Four hundred thirteen days after Marx had died, Unfair Games threw a party to celebrate the launch of Counterpart High: Senior Year.
Simon, dressed in royal blue cap and gown, got a bit inebriated, and then, as often follows, a bit maudlin, and then he did a celebratory line of coke to wake himself up. He turned to reminiscing about what it had been like when Marx had discovered them. “We didn’t have that much. We were still in college. The shittiest demo. A two-hundred-page, deeply clunky treatment, and a couple of pages of concept art.”