Rowan saw it when she came over with takeout. "Chicago."
"I haven't said yes."
"You wrote it down."
"Pencil," Theo said, and hated how small the word sounded.
Rowan set the takeout on the table harder than the noodles deserved. "I'm not asking you to quit your job. I'm asking you not to make me find out about my competition by reading your furniture."
"It's not a competition."
"It is to the kids," Rowan said. "And it is to me, in the way that showing up is always a competition with every other shiny demand."
Theo rubbed his face. The radiator clanked, unhelpful. "If I turn Chicago down, my producer will treat me like I've become unreliable."
"If you take Chicago and miss the showcase, I will treat you like you've become familiar," Rowan said. The sentence was quiet and sharp. "Familiar in the April way."
Silence opened. Theo did not fill it with a joke. He looked at the pencil mark, then at Rowan in his kitchen with her coat still on because she had not decided whether she was staying long enough to hang it.
"I'll tell him no," Theo said.
"Don't tell him no for me like I'm a penance."
"I'll tell him no because I already have a commitment, even if I was too cowardly to ink it," Theo said. "And because I am trying to become a person whose calendar matches his mouth."
Rowan stood still for a long moment. Then she took off her coat and hung it on the chair. "Okay. We eat. We talk about something else for twenty minutes. Then we come back to whether pencil is ever an acceptable font for promises."
They ate. They talked about Otis's new attempt to apologize to Bridie with a playlist, which Bridie had called "emotionally loud and chronologically confused." After twenty minutes, Rowan reached across the table and inked a small star on Theo's calendar beside the showcase date.