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“No, it doesn’t,” Peabody told her.
“I don’t know if we’d have stuck. I mean, things were good, and I think maybe . . . But I don’t know, and I keep thinking about that. Would we have moved in together, or even gotten married? I don’t know.”
“Did you ever talk about it?” Eve wondered. “Moving in together?”
CeeCee managed a little smile. “We sort of circled around it. I don’t think either of us was ready for that. I think if we’d stayed together a few more months, we’d have talked about it, seriously. We weren’t in a hurry, you know? We thought we had plenty of time.”
“And you each had your own interests,” Eve prompted. “Your own routines and your own friends.”
“That’s true. I had a boyfriend once, and he crowded me. It was like if we weren’t together twenty-four/seven, I didn’t care enough. It wasn’t like that with Bart. We did a lot together, and he liked my friends, I liked his. But we didn’t have to be together every minute.”
“You got along
well with his partners. His closest friends.”
“Sure. They’re great. Good thing,” she added with a smile that warmed her tired eyes. “I don’t think I’d’ve been Bart’s girl if I hadn’t liked his friends, and they hadn’t liked me back.”
“Oh?”
“Well, they’re like family. Some people have trouble with family. I could tell you about my sister.” She rolled her eyes now, and Eve began to see some of the charm and energy that must have attracted Bart eke through the grief. “But I guess, I don’t know, when you choose your family it’s different. You can still disagree or argue, but you’re always going to stand up for each other, too. I guess that’s true with my sister, even when I’m mad at her.”
“It’d be natural for Bart to get mad at his partners sometimes.”
“Maybe, but he really didn’t. It was more like he’d shake his head and go, Jeez, what’s Cill thinking about this, or What’s Benny doing that for, or Var’s out of orbit on this one.”
“He’d talk to you about them.”
“Sure. I’d be a kind of decompression chamber for him, if they’d had a rough few days. I know they’d been working really hard on a new project. Long hours and lots of testing stuff. Maybe they argued a little, the way you do over stuff like that, especially when you’re overdoing it.”
“Anything specific? Every detail helps,” Eve added when CeeCee bit her lip. “One thing can lead to another, give us a better picture.”
“Oh. Well. I know he was miffed at Cill a couple weeks ago. Nothing big, but he was upset that she’d gone overbudget for a marketing campaign proposal. And she was miffed because she put a lot of time into it and thought it was worth the extra. And he didn’t. She gets madder than he does. Did.”
She sighed, then shook it off.
“He said they yelled at each other, but he doesn’t—didn’t—really yell, so I’d say she did that part. But they made up, like always. He bought her flowers. He liked giving flowers. And he and Var got into it about the direction of this new game. It was technical, so Bart didn’t really say what. Just about how they weren’t going off mission statement, and not everything should reach its full potential. That’s a weird thing to say, isn’t it?”
“Yeah. What did he mean?”
“I don’t know. He just said U-Play was about play, and that was that. He could be a little stubborn. Not often, but when he was . . . It was kind of cute.”
“How about Bart and Benny? Any tension?”
“They go back so far. They’d tease each other a lot—that kind of ragging guys do on each other. Like I was over there last week, because we were going to catch a vid after work. He and Benny were testing one of the games, going one-on-one, and Bart just slaughtered him. And Bart rubbed his face in it. They do that all the time, but I guess all the work they’d been putting in was starting to tell, because Benny got steamed. I could see it. Benny said maybe they’d try it IRL—in real life—next time and stalked off. Bart just laughed. I told him when we left he’d hurt Benny’s feelings.”
She shrugged. “It was just guy stuff. Stupid guy stuff.”
“She’s a nice woman,” Peabody commented when they got back in the car. “I know it’s pointless to speculate, but I think they would’ve stuck. His history indicates he’s the sticking kind.”
“Yeah. And he feels a little more normal now. Gets irritated with friends, has some arguments.”
“None of them seemed murderous.”
“Not to him. We can’t be sure about the friend. Cill—questioning her authority and creativity. Var—shutting down an idea for change. Benny—skewering his ego and e-skills. It tells us he’s normal, that two of the partners wanted something he didn’t and were overruled, and the third got his ass kicked in front of others. It’s unlikely any of those incidents were the first of their kind, and very possible any of those incidents was, for one of them, a last straw.”
“You and I argue, and you’ve been known to shut me down and kick my ass. I’m not plotting your murder. At this time.”
“I bet you’ve imagined kicking my ass.”
