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  Which worked for exactly one day, until she was processing her orders on Friday. There was the usual blatant pattern: the people who did the most intensive work with their computers were the ones on a four- or five-year replacement schedule, while the higher-paid managers, department heads, and lab directors, who didn’t actually need fast processors or a ton of RAM, were replacing theirs after a year or two. And then there was Elizabeth, getting rid of a laptop that couldn’t be more than six months old.

  When Saturday morning arrived, Anna still couldn’t work up the mental readiness to meet Elizabeth at the Bean Grinder. She’d felt intimidated and nervous around her during their last encounter; why should she subject herself to stressful work dynamics on a day off? What did they really have to talk about? Elizabeth obviously moved in a stratospheric social circle, and Anna had no place in it. Anna hated campus politics; Elizabeth lived and breathed it. They were worlds apart, and the more Anna thought about meeting her, the more she didn’t want to.

  She spent the morning in an agony of indecision. On the one hand, she felt a responsibility to show up. After all, last week she’d gone so far as to chase Elizabeth down just to set up today’s meeting. On the other hand, she felt anxious just thinking about forcing herself through what would undoubtedly be an awkward time.

  Her anxiety increased when the time for her to leave came and went. She paced around her house, watching the clock and thinking, I should be there right now, or By now we’d have our scones and drinks. The guilt at not showing up added to her burden, until she finally reasoned it away when she remembered that last Saturday, they hadn’t specifically agreed to meet. She’d just said she’d like to. And when she’d last seen Elizabeth, she still hadn’t specifically said she would meet her, just that she was there every Saturday.

  And she would be. But first she killed time doing chores around the house, until she was reasonably certain that Elizabeth would have given up on her. Then she took the long way round to the Bean Grinder, since it was such a nice day. Her heart pounded when she reached the shop and walked past the floor-to-ceiling windows, trying to scan the tables out of the corner of her eye. It wasn’t until she pushed the door open and made sure of Elizabeth’s absence that her heart rate began to slow.

  This late, the morning rush was long over and there was no line. “Hi, Kyung,” she said with a bit of forced cheer.

  “Ms. Petrowski, good morning!” He was busily stacking mugs, so she waited at the counter until he finished. With a flourish, he dropped the last mug on top of the stack and turned to her. “Are you making it a triple caramel mocha this time?”

  “No, just my usual double. Stop trying to change my order.” She’d seen at a glance that the chocolate cherry scones were gone, not that she expected otherwise. “Did you save me a scone?”

  “I gave it to Elizabeth,” he said. “She’s been waiting for you over—” He stopped and looked around the coffee shop. “Huh. Well, she was in the corner.”

  Anna turned to look at the perfectly clean, empty table and stood rooted to the ground in dismay. Elizabeth had taken her scone?

  Her scone?

  “I’m a little late,” she said weakly. “Guess I missed her. Just the mocha, please.” She pasted on a smile meant to assure him that none of this was of any consequence, but the moment he turned away, it dropped from her face. That scone was a message to her, and she didn’t care for it one bit.

  CHAPTER 6

  On Wednesday afternoon, Anna stacked her cart with two shiny new boxes—one of which was quite large—and began pushing it across the campus. For the past five days she’d been planning out what she was going to say when she saw Elizabeth again. She had her reasons for not showing up for their meeting, but what reason could Elizabeth have for taking her scone? It wasn’t that the scone itself was such a big deal; it was the principle of the thing! Elizabeth had known exactly what she was doing. It was catty and immature and clearly just a petty revenge. And while it was true that skipping out certainly hadn’t been Anna’s finest hour, at least her actions hadn’t been motivated by spite. She’d thought better of Elizabeth and had every intention of telling her so. It was for that reason only that she was doing this installation herself; otherwise she’d have turned the whole thing over to Martin and washed her hands of it. But without the computer gear, she had no reason to be in Elizabeth’s office. Nor did she plan to enter it again after today.

  Her wheels rattled over the sidewalk cracks, making a racket in perfect keeping with her mood. She pushed it up the wheelchair access ramp outside the Admin building, nodding her thanks to a student who held the glass door open for her. The elevator was already on the ground floor, and as she rolled the cart inside and began the ride upward, she felt the knot in her stomach getting larger and heavier. Anna hated conflict and would normally go out of her way to avoid it, but this time was different.

  Unfortunately, her stomach knot wasn’t listening to her sense of righteousness and persisted in growing more debilitating the closer she got to room 315. By the time she greeted Chanda, it was an effort to speak normally.

  “Anna, hello!” said Chanda. “Dr. Markel has been looking forward to this.” She rubbed her hands together gleefully. “And so have I. It feels a bit like Christmas! I can’t wait to get my hands on my new computer.”

  Anna couldn’t help but smile. “Given what you’ve been used to, you’ll love the speed; that’s for sure.”

  “I know! And it’s a laptop. I’ll be able to do my work anywhere! Dr. Markel has already said that if I’m doing a project that needs high concentration, I can go to the library or the student union for a while. Somewhere that the phone can’t interrupt me.”

  “I know exactly what you mean,” Anna said. Indicating the door, she asked, “Is she in?”

  “Yes, she’s been waiting for you.” Chanda went to announce her arrival while Anna took a deep breath. Receiving the affirmative nod from the admin assistant, she pushed the cart across the office and through the inner doorway.

  Elizabeth sat behind her desk, a carefully blank expression on her face. “Hi. Thank you for being on time.”

  Anna heard the unspoken this time loud and clear, and her stomach knot expanded to take up her entire abdominal cavity, effectively driving her planned speech right out of her head.

  In the ensuing silence, Elizabeth got up and closed the office door. “Is everything all right?”

  “Yes, fine,” she answered automatically.

  “That’s good.” Elizabeth leaned against the front of her desk, arms crossed over her chest. “When you left me sitting in the coffee shop for ninety minutes, I was worried that something had happened to you.”

  Now the knot twisted painfully in place. It had never occurred to her that Elizabeth might actually worry about her.

  “I called your office Monday morning just to see if you were in,” Elizabeth continued, after waiting for a response that Anna couldn’t make. “A very nice gentleman by the name of Martin told me that you were over at Soil Sciences on a service request. So then I worried that something else was going on, something personal that kept you from meeting me. I thought maybe you’d call to let me know—since of course you couldn’t call on the weekend. We never exchanged numbers.”

  She watched Anna, still keeping her expression blank, and in that moment Anna realized she’d seriously screwed up. It shouldn’t have mattered how uncomfortable she’d felt around Elizabeth; she had agreed to meet and she should have kept her agreement. Even if it was just for an awkward, ten-minute visit before she made her excuses and left. The justifications she’d given herself all week, which had seemed so compelling at the time, now looked flimsy and immature.

  “I did go,” she blurted. “But you’d already left.” And then, because she couldn’t quite stop herself, she added, “Taking my scone with you.”

  Elizabeth’s eyebrows rose. “Your scone? I took a scone that I paid for. It would have been yours if you’d shown up. But you didn’t
, and I’m still hoping you’ll tell me why.” The guilt must have shown on Anna’s face, because Elizabeth sighed and shook her head. “Okay,” she said, “clearly I’m the only one who thought we had a date. My mistake. Shall we get on with this, then?” She gestured toward the cart.

  “No, wait,” said Anna, whose brain had taken a moment to stumble over the word date. “Elizabeth, I—shit, I’m sorry. It never occurred to me that that was a date. And we never actually confirmed a time.”

  “As I said, my mistake,” Elizabeth said coolly. “I made some assumptions. Including the assumption that when we said ‘the usual time,’ it meant that we’d meet at your usual time.”

  How had she thought that was defensible? “No, it was a fair assumption,” she said, cursing the blush she could feel heating up her face. “Even as a friend I shouldn’t have skipped out.”

  “Then why did you? Anna, you left me sitting there for an hour and a half. At first I thought maybe I’d gotten the time wrong, that we were supposed to meet at ten thirty instead of nine thirty. But by eleven o’clock it was pretty obvious that you were standing me up. And I really didn’t think you were the type.”

  By now Anna felt an inch high. Elizabeth wasn’t saying it, but she’d obviously been hurt. And everything Anna had been grumbling over for the past week melted away in the face of her own culpability.

  “I’m not the type,” she said. “Not normally. I just—” She stopped, trying to find the words. The expectant look on Elizabeth’s face tied up her thought processes, and in the end she could manage nothing more eloquent than a quiet admission. “I’m not in your league. You’re a vice provost, for God’s sake. You make me nervous, and I didn’t want to spend any part of my weekend dealing with work relationships.” She winced at how that had sounded. “I mean—”

  “You mean you wrote me off the moment you saw my nameplate,” Elizabeth said. “I knew there was something wrong last Wednesday. You walked in here and just froze. But I was hoping it wasn’t that.”

  Stung, Anna went on the defensive. “Well, it was a bit of a shock. You could have told me earlier!”

  “Would it have made a difference?”

  Anna opened her mouth to answer, then closed it and shook her head.

  “Okay.” Elizabeth’s quiet voice was worse than any anger she could have shown. “Better to know now than later. It would be nice to be judged by my actions instead of my job title, but perhaps I should thank you for saving me from what would undoubtedly have been an awkward friendship at best.” She paused, then added sadly, “It’s too bad, because I really liked that person I met in the coffee shop. I just haven’t seen her here.”

  Oh, that hit hard. I am that person in the coffee shop, Anna wanted to say, but was it even true? Certainly she had no way of convincing Elizabeth of that. Not based on her behavior so far.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. It was completely insufficient, but it was all she had to offer.

  Elizabeth nodded. “Me too. And I guess that’s all we need to say about it.” She turned away and walked behind her desk once again. “What do you need from me for this installation? All of my files are in one of two directories, so that should be pretty simple. I don’t know what to do about the e-mail, though.”

  Jarred by the sudden end to the conversation, Anna could only marvel at the mantle of professionalism Elizabeth had so easily drawn about herself. “Don’t worry, I’ll take care of it,” she said. “If you’ll just show me which files you want transferred, you can leave the rest to me. I’d like you to be nearby for a few necessary questions, but otherwise you don’t need to stand around waiting.” She turned to the cart, opened up the smaller box, and pulled the laptop out of its packaging. It was a relief to take shelter in what she knew and was good at, but at the same time, she had the feeling she’d just lost something valuable. And she had no one to blame but herself.

  She carried the laptop over to the desk and plugged it in. “You’ll need to charge the battery first thing. Here’s a little instruction sheet on battery maintenance…” She held out the single sheet of paper that she’d tucked into the box earlier, “…to tell you how to make your battery last as long as possible.”

  “Thanks.” Elizabeth took the paper and began reading it as the laptop booted up. The little “welcome” movie got her attention, though, and she was actually smiling by the end of it. “Well, that was new,” she commented as she peered at the screen, which now featured a single icon of a hard drive. “Wait a minute. Is this all there is? Where are all the useless programs and web service ads and trial softwares that get packaged with it?”

  “Ah, the joy of crapware. It’s not here.”

  “Crapware?”

  “Geek speak for all the crap that gets bundled with Windows.”

  “What an apt term. I hate all of that. The first thing I do when I get a new computer is go through and uninstall half the programs on it.”

  “You and everyone else,” Anna said. “But this isn’t a Windows machine. You’re going to have to get used to that.” She moved through a few screens, setting location, language, network access, and an administrative account, then created a new user account and turned the laptop to face the other side of the desk. “Okay, give yourself a login name and a password, and write that password down.”

  Elizabeth sat in her visitor’s chair and pulled the laptop closer. She thought for a moment, then entered the information and turned the laptop back around.

  “Don’t go away,” Anna said. “I’m going to need you to set up your Apple ID next.” After opening the browser, she pulled up the Apple ID page and turned the laptop again. “Go ahead and fill this out, and write this password down, too. While you’re doing that, I’m going to figure out which programs I need to push to your machine.”

  She pulled up a list of the applications on the old laptop and e-mailed it to herself, then took the steps necessary on her end to get Elizabeth enrolled in the university’s Mac App Store software distribution pipeline. When she glanced up again, Elizabeth was immersed in her online form, looking thoughtful. For a moment, Anna flashed back to their long coffee-slash-lunch, when they’d spent hours sitting across a table from each other, just as they were now. Anna had felt so comfortable with her then.

  Actually, she realized, she felt quite comfortable now. Which was rather odd considering the conversation they’d had not ten minutes ago.

  It’s because you’re doing what you know, she told herself. Certainly it wasn’t because she felt at ease with Vice Provost Markel.

  The reflective moment ended when Elizabeth said, “Okay, done,” and turned the laptop again.

  “Great. Then I just need you to show me which files you want transferred, and you can leave the rest to me.”

  Elizabeth got up and came around the desk, standing next to Anna and leaning over as she clicked into her document folders and explained what she wanted. She wore a subtle scent, which Anna only now noticed, and was so close that when she turned her head while pointing something out, their faces were only inches apart.

  If anyone had asked Anna to recall what she said in that moment, she’d have come up blank. She simply responded on autopilot while her brain was busy cataloguing all of the ways in which Elizabeth was so damned attractive, and why had she blown her off again? Oh, right, because she was an idiot.

  “—thing else?”

  Anna looked up at Elizabeth, who had straightened and was watching her with an expectant air.

  “No, that’s all I need,” Anna said, answering what she thought the question had been. “I’ll probably call you over one more time to put in your Apple ID so I can push software to your machine, but other than that, I’ll just sit here and amuse myself.”

  Elizabeth shook her head. “Only a computer geek would call this amusing. The rest of us call it torture that we’re happy to shove off on someone else.”

  “Guilty as charged,” Anna said. Then she waved her off and began the process of transferring fi
les and e-mail, while Elizabeth moved over to the table and settled in with what looked like a stack of reports.

  Anna clicked away on two different keyboards, letting herself sink into the cut-and-dried world of computers. It was an easy and straightforward installation, and Elizabeth was visibly shocked when Anna called her over an hour later to run through some basic training.

  “But…it usually takes half a day before I can use a new computer! Hell, once it took three days just for IT to upgrade my computer to Windows XP.” She stared at the screen.

  “This isn’t Windows.”

  “I’m beginning to understand that.”

  Anna gave her an overview of her new operating system, showed her where her programs and files were now living, and then left her to experiment while she unplugged the old monitor’s cables and carried it to the cart. The old laptop, now swept clean of Elizabeth’s files, soon joined it, and she pushed the cart into the outer office. “Chanda, are you ready for your new computer?”

  “Oh, yes.” Chanda scooted her chair back to make room and hovered in general delight while Anna set the laptop on her desk and created a new intranet access. Then she plugged her portable hard drive into the old desktop PC and began copying Chanda’s files over.

  “Do you have much on your hard drive, or is most of it on the intranet?” she asked.

  “I keep most of my current work on my hard drive and use the intranet for archiving and backup,” said Chanda. “Will that need to change with the laptop?”

  “No. In fact, you’re going to want any current work on your hard drive if you wander out to sit in the sun while you’re working.”

  “Ohhhh, I am so looking forward to that!” Chanda swayed back and forth in a sedate version of a happy dance. “I still can’t believe Dr. Markel is just giving her computer to me.”

  “Why wouldn’t she?” asked Anna, selecting another set of folders to copy. “Trickle-down equipment is a fine university tradition.”