The Broken Promise

Callie

Somewhere in this city is the person who built this spreadsheet. They’re probably fine. They’re having a perfectly normal day. They have absolutely no idea what they’ve done to me.

I’ve been looking at it for two hours and fifty minutes. In that time I’ve identified merged cells spanning columns with no logical relationship to each other, three different date formats operating across four worksheets like rival factions, and a significant quantity of data entered into comment boxes rather than cells, which is a choice someone made, presumably whilst maintaining eye contact with God.

There is also a column titled OTHER that contains everything the responsible party couldn’t be bothered to categorise, including a lunch order from March.

I push back from my desk and look at the ceiling. Then at the screen.

The lunch order is still there. Two katsu curries and a Diet Coke, sitting in row 408 like it pays rent.

The data isn’t broken, as such. It’s been maintained by someone who treated the spreadsheet as a dumping ground rather than a system. Everything is in here, just not where it should be, because the person who put it here knew where everything was and never imagined a future in which they weren’t the one looking.

Someone else has to find it now. Someone else is me. Someone else is always me, which I’d complain about more convincingly if I didn’t secretly love it.

Because I do love it. I don’t say that out loud, but give me a mess with a pattern hiding in it, and I will forget to eat. There’s a moment, every time, where the chaos tips over into sense, where you can see, all at once, the shape someone’s thinking left behind in the data, and it feels like the tumblers of a lock going over. I chase that moment professionally. It’s on my LinkedIn dressed up in different words.

By the time the file looks like something a reasonable person could use, it’s gone half four and the second floor has mostly emptied out. The office has that end-of-day quiet where the fluorescent lights seem louder than they should be and the vending machine hums to itself like it’s finally allowed to.

On the desk diagonally across from mine, Dev from compliance has fallen asleep at his keyboard. Head tipped back, mouth open, glasses sliding off one ear. He’d be mortified. His screen is maybe thirty seconds from timing out, and when it does his Teams status will flip from green to yellow to away, and if his manager checks the activity log tomorrow, and his manager is the type who checks, Dev is going to have a very specific kind of conversation.

The compliance team have been doing seventy-hour weeks since the audit landed.

I get up, cross the floor, and wiggle his mouse. His status stays green. He doesn’t stir. On the way back, I turn the brightness on his monitor down a notch, because the man deserves to sleep in slightly better lighting.

I’m shutting down my laptop when Alfie appears at the edge of my desk. He hovers a polite half-step back, jacket over one arm.

“Any plans tonight?” he asks, a shade too hopefully.

“Just home,” I say, as apologetically as I can manage. “I need an early night.” Three weeks of broken sleep with nothing to blame for it has left me with not much in the tank by six o’clock. I haven’t worked out the cause yet.

“Right, yeah. A few of us are heading to the Anchor if you fancy it. It’s quiz night. Sean has been revising, which we’re all choosing to find funny rather than concerning.”

That does pull a laugh out of me, because Sean once argued with the quiz host himself over the capital of Australia and lost. “Tempting. But I’d be a liability. I’d fall asleep during the picture round.”

“You’d still outscore Sean.”

“Obviously. Another time, though. I promise.”

“Another time,” he agrees, easily, and heads for the stairs, and it’s only when he’s gone that I replay the exchange in my head, the way I sometimes do with Alfie, not because anything was wrong with it but because nothing ever is.

He’s kind in a way that doesn’t seem to cost him anything. He remembers things, small things, the kind most people let fall through, and Alfie apparently keeps. Last week he brought me a coffee I hadn’t asked for. It was my exact order. Oat milk, an extra shot, and a single pump of vanilla. I don’t remember telling him my order, but I must have done. Probably some kitchen conversation months ago that he’s remembered and I haven’t. He has such a good memory, Alfie. It’s honestly a little wasted on quiz nights.

I do the walk home in fifteen minutes. I always walk faster when I’m tired. Counterproductive, and entirely on brand. It’s the tail end of the golden hour, and the street is doing its best impression of a nicer postcode, all long shadows and lit windows. I play the game I always play on this stretch, glancing into other people’s front rooms and awarding points for bookshelves.

Benj is on my sofa when I get in. I know before I open the living room door, because his shoes are in the hall and his jacket is on the hook I have asked him, three times, with escalating politeness, not to use for his jacket. He has a key. He’s had a key for four months. He treats my flat the way he treats his own. Without ceremony, like the question of whether he’s welcome was settled long before he was born.

His laptop is on his knees. The football is on in the background. He looks up and smiles at me, and it’s a good smile, wide and easy, his whole face involved.

“Hey, you,” he says.

He makes room without being asked. I sit, he pulls me in, I let him. For a while we watch the football, or he watches it and I look at it, which aren’t quite the same thing, and it’s easy.

That’s the word for Benj and me. Easy. We fit well. No awkward gaps, nothing to manage. His thumb moves across my knuckles, slow, absent, and I look at our hands together and let myself picture it in full for once. A ring. A house with a hook he’s allowed to use. Sunday mornings that look more or less exactly like this evening. It’s a good picture. It’s a perfectly good picture.

Lately I’ve been wondering whether a perfectly good picture is enough.

On screen, someone in a red shirt scuffs a shot wide from six yards, and Benj makes a sound of pure contempt.

“He’s finished,” he says. “Look at him. Thirty-two and moving like his boots are full of wet sand. Should’ve been binned two seasons ago.” His voice has gone flat and cold, a register he never uses on me. He isn’t ranting. He’s dismantling, like the man on screen is a problem he’s already solved and filed. “Absolute waste of a shirt.”

It’s not kind, and it isn’t really about the football. And the thing I notice, in the second before I notice anything else, is the low warm pull of it beneath my ribs. My body responding to the edge in his voice like it’s been waiting all evening for him to show it. Which is not the reaction a nice person has to her boyfriend being casually vicious about a stranger, and I’m aware of that, and awareness turns out to change nothing.

“Harsh,” I say.

“True, though.” And his smile is back, wide and easy, the edge gone so cleanly I could believe I imagined it, if I hadn’t felt it land.

He turns the volume up for a corner, and I stay where I am and let the evening empty out around us. By nine he’s asleep against me. He goes under without effort, without doubt. A man untroubled at a cellular level. I envy it so much I could bite him.

I give him a nudge towards the bedroom as I slide out from under his arm and go to put the kettle on.

While it boils, I text Elias, one hip against the counter, kitchen dark except for the light over the hob. His name is at the top of my messages. His name is always at the top of my messages. It’s been sitting there for seven years, long enough that I’ve stopped noticing, the way you stop noticing a lighthouse if you grow up next to one.

Callie: Tell me something good.

Elias: I found a structural issue in the project that saves us six weeks. Which means I’ve spent six weeks creating the problem I just solved, but let’s focus on the second part.

I laugh, out loud, alone in my kitchen, and it goes on quietly after the sound stops. There’s a difference in how my chest sits when I’m talking to Elias and when I’m not. Nothing dramatic. More like a room with the window open versus one without. You don’t notice the window until you feel the air move.

Callie: That’s either brilliant or catastrophic and I support you either way.

Elias: How’s the dataset?

Callie: Criminal. There was a lunch order in it.

Elias: That is so weird. Why would that even be there?

Callie: THANK YOU. Benj just said “so delete it” like that addresses the culture that produced it.

Elias: He’s not wrong. He’s just answering a smaller question than the one you asked.

I read that twice. He does this, sums a thing up so cleanly it clicks shut, and half the time the thing he’s summing up is a person, and the person is usually Benj. It never sounds like criticism. It just sounds true. That’s a skill I’ve decided not to look at directly.

Elias: Shouldn’t you be sleeping?

Callie: Getting there. And hey. I’m really glad you’re my friend, you know that?

The typing dots appear. Stop. Appear again. Long enough for me to wonder if I’ve made it weird, dropping something sincere into the middle of katsu curry chat, but this is Elias. There’s no weird with Elias. The dots resolve.

Elias: 👀

Elias: Go to sleep, Callie.

I smile at my phone for longer than is necessary, then put it away, make my tea, turn off the hob light.

I check the front door before bed. Handle down, chain across. Every night, in that order, without fail.

Benj doesn’t stir when I slide in next to him. The flat settles into its familiar sounds: the boiler, the one squeaky floorboard, the quiet that means everything is fine.

Everything is fine.