CODA

One Year Later

Cooper Black. That’s the font we went with on the door. I hate it, honestly—if you’re not familiar with that one, it’s this bubbly-looking 1970s lettering that is totally at odds with the PI aesthetic. But these are concessions you make. In exchange for the weird-ass font, I got my name first.

Moss & Shuler Investigations. I thought it looked zippy, even with the dopey font, although most of the time I looked at it, it said “snoitagitsevnI reluhS & ssoM,” which is not as inspiring as you might imagine.

I watched the door open now, hoping to see my first official client, but instead Charice walked in with Haile.

They were wearing matching clothes, Charice and Haile, despite looking nothing alike. Charice: white, skinny, pasty, late twenties. Haile: black, chubby, splotchy, three months old. It wasn’t cloying—it’s not like they were in matching sailor suits; they were just ladies in red. As the song goes.

“Oh my God,” I said upon seeing Haile. “I haven’t seen her in weeks. And, Jesus, look at how much bigger she is in just this time. It doesn’t make sense. It feels logistically impossible.”

“She’s smarter too,” said Charice, suddenly careening into baby talk. “Why, isn’t she the smartest little thing in the world? Yes she is!”

“She ought to be, considering her parents,” I said. Haile cooed. “I gotta see her more, Charice. What kind of fake aunt am I going to be?”

“I’m sorry. I’ve been so distant lately,” said Charice. “I’ve got a lot going on.”

“Hey, you’ve been busy.”

“Yeah. Somehow I got roped into painting Tyler and Masako’s apartment,” Charice said, then paused. “Oh, you meant with parenting.”

I did mean parenting, but it was nice to know that Charice always had other projects going.

“Is Nathan coming to cut the ribbon?” asked Charice.

“He has to teach,” I said. “We figure we’ll let him clean up the first body instead.”

Nathan and I, by the way, are still going solid and steady. But just steady and not anything more serious than that yet. We figure since all of our friends are getting married, there’s no rush. Even Steven (remember that guy?) was getting married, and he was dating a druid.

Shuler, coming out of a larger side office—another part of my deal making, in getting my name first on the door—said:

“Hey, Haile! Hey, Charice!”

“The paint dry on this place yet?” asked Charice.

“Just barely,” said Shuler. “I was thinking we should throw a guy through the door for good luck. Like, you know, a champagne bottle for a ship.”

“There’s a dentist office next door,” observed Charice. “Throwing guys through doors probably wouldn’t put the patients in the waiting room in a relaxed state.”

“Yeah,” I said. “But on the plus side, if the guy chips his tooth in the process, we’d be all set.”

“And,” said Shuler, “there’s even a mortuary across the street. All of our bases are covered.”

“All your base are belong to us,” I said, quoting the Internet meme.

I laughed—at my own joke—but then Haile laughed at it too, and I was suddenly very happy, and oddly sad. In video games, there’s such a thing as leveling up. You finish one chapter, one story, and things advance, and get harder, or better, or more interesting, before you take a turn again.

In real life, you never feel this. Not as it happens. You don’t get the bling sound of the score raising, or rainbows shooting across the sky as “Ode to Joy” plays. It’s a shame, really. We deserve it.

But even so, every so often, you can look around and see that it happened, even if you missed the interstitial movie. Things change. Life moves on. And here I was, in my own office, with my name on the door. I had a business partner who was smart and awesome and with whom I had not screwed things up. My best friend’s baby was sitting on my desk—my desk!—laughing, maybe, at a dumb joke I had made.

I had leveled up.

And the next round was going to be awesome.