The Ache Between Us

5. The Table

Lunch happened in the kitchen. David had told me most people ate at their desks or ordered in, but there was a long table where a few people gathered, and I stood in the doorway with my dabba from the hotel restaurant doing the social math. I could sit alone at my desk and be the unfriendly new person, or I could sit at the table and make small talk with strangers, which was the thing I was worst at and the thing that required the most performance from me.

I sat at the table.

There were three people already there. A woman with cropped hair and sharp eyes who turned out to be Meera, the coffee-sign Meera, head of product. A quiet developer named Faisal, who nodded hello and went back to his biryani without needing anything more from me, which I appreciated. And a man sitting across the table who looked up from his phone when I sat down and smiled in a way that was a little too smooth.

“You’re the Spekka founder.” He extended his hand across the table. “Vikram Grewal. I handle partnerships and BD.”

His handshake was the same as his smile, polished in a way that I recognized because I was good at surfaces too. I know what it looks like when someone has spent years perfecting theirs, because I’ve spent years perfecting mine.

“Ananya,” I said. “Nice to meet you.”

“Kabir’s been talking about your app for weeks. He doesn’t usually get excited about early-stage products, so you must have really impressed him.”

“The app impressed him,” I said. “I just built it.”

Vikram smiled again. “Modest. That’s rare around here.”

Meera looked up from her salad. “It’s not modesty, it’s accuracy. The product is the product. Stop making it weird, Vikram.”

I liked Meera immediately. There was no performing with her, no calculation in the way she spoke. She said what she meant, and you could either keep up or get out of the way, and I found that so refreshing after years of reading people’s subtext that I almost laughed.

Vikram raised his hands in mock surrender. “Just being friendly.”

The conversation moved on after that. Faisal said something about a deployment issue. Meera complained about a client who kept changing the scope. Vikram checked his phone twice in three minutes. It was a normal office lunch with normal people, and I ate my dal and rice and listened and said the right things at the right moments, and nobody looked at me like I didn’t belong there. That shouldn’t have felt like an achievement, but I have a low bar for what counts as a good day, and not being looked at like an imposter clears it every time.

* * *

The first week passed in a rhythm I hadn’t expected to find so quickly. I coded in the mornings, had meetings with David about integration points or with Faisal about backend architecture in the afternoons, and coded again in the evenings, alone in my alcove with my headphones in while the office emptied around me.

I saw Kabir in meetings and in the hallway, and once in the kitchen when he was refilling his water bottle while I waited for the coffee machine. We spoke about the app and the roadmap and a specific UX issue I was stuck on, which he had a surprisingly good eye for, given that he was a finance person. When I told him that, he said, “I notice when things don’t work,” which was such a simple sentence that I had no business thinking about it for the rest of the afternoon, and yet I did.

He was professional the entire week. Appropriate. There was no trace of whatever I thought I’d felt in the conference room that first day, no lingering looks or accidental touches or subtext in his voice when he said my name. He treated me the way you treat a respected colleague, which meant I’d imagined the rest of it. And that was fine. That was actually a relief, because it meant I didn’t have to deal with it, and dealing with things has always been my least favorite activity after feeling things.

By Friday, I’d fixed the dialect module, added two new language tracks, and submitted a revised product roadmap to David that was, if I’m being honest, the best strategic document I’d ever written. Working in a real office with real resources after years of freelancing from a bedroom was like being given oxygen after breathing through a straw, and everything moved faster and worked better, including me.

I almost called my father to tell him. I got as far as opening the contact and staring at his name on the screen. Then I put the phone down and went back to work, because that’s what I do when I feel something I don’t want to feel. I work until it passes.

* * *