Chapter 14: Practical Applications (Continued)

"You made my practice better with a spreadsheet." She sat down across from him. "Do you know how long I've been doing this intuitively?"

"Three years, according to the notebook."

"And in three hours you found something I missed."

"You would have found it eventually."

"Maybe. Maybe not." She reached across the table and took his hand. "This is what you can do that no one else in my life can do. You can see the shape of things."

Marcus felt the familiar warmth of being useful, but it was different this time. It was not about solving a puzzle. It was about contributing to something that mattered to her.

"I want to keep doing it," he said. "If you'll let me."

"Let you data-mine my entire practice?"

"Let me help."

Wren studied him. "You understand that intuition is part of the work? That you can't reduce it all to columns?"

"Of course. Data doesn't replace intuition. It contextualizes it."

"And you're not going to try to prove anything?"

"I'm going to try to understand. Those are different goals."

She nodded slowly. "Okay. But I get final say on all blends. You're an analyst, not a witch."

"I can live with that title."

Wren laughed and stood up. "Come on, analyst. I need to make dinner, and then I need to prepare Elaine's next working. With peppermint, apparently."

"I can help with that too."

"You can set the table."

"That's a waste of my analytical talents."

"It's a use of your hands. Move."

They made dinner together—pasta with garlic and herbs from her garden, wine that Marcus had brought, bread from the bakery on the corner. Marcus set the table with the precision he applied to everything, and Wren mocked him for folding the napkins into rectangles.

"Rectangles are efficient," he said.

"Rectangles are boring."

"Efficiency and boredom are not mutually exclusive."

"Everything with you is either a spreadsheet or a geometry problem."

"And everything with you is either an herb or a metaphor."

"We balance each other."

Marcus stopped arranging napkins and looked at her. "Yes," he said. "We do."

After dinner, they worked on Elaine's blend. Marcus entered the new combination into the spreadsheet while Wren ground herbs and spoke quietly to herself—intention-setting, she called it, though to Marcus it sounded like a conversation with the work itself. He did not interrupt. He was learning that some parts of her practice needed witness, not participation.

When the blend was finished, Wren sealed it in a small cloth bag and set it on the altar with a candle.

"For tomorrow," she said.

"Will it help?"

"It will help. It won't fix. Nothing fixes grief." She turned to him. "But having the right combination matters. And now I know more about what right means."

"Because of a spreadsheet."

"Because of you."

The words were simple, but they landed with weight. Marcus crossed the room and kissed her. It was not a dramatic kiss. It was the kiss of two people who had spent the day building something together, who had found a shared language in the space between data and intuition.

"I should go home," he said against her mouth.

"You should stay."

"I have an early meeting."

"So do I." She pulled back enough to look at him. "Stay. We can be tired together in the morning."

Marcus thought about his apartment—the empty refrigerator, the desk facing the window, the bed that had not felt like his in weeks. He thought about Wren's apartment, where his toothbrush now lived and his socks kept ending up in herb jars.

"Okay," he said.

They went to bed without ceremony. Wren fell asleep against his shoulder, her hand on his chest, her breathing even and deep. Marcus lay awake for a while, listening to her, thinking about the spreadsheet he had made and the patterns he had found and the woman beside him who had trusted him with the thing she valued most.

He had spent his life looking for systems. For rules. For the hidden order beneath apparent chaos. And here, in this small apartment filled with herbs and candlelight, he had found something better—not a system to understand, but a person who made understanding worthwhile.

He closed his eyes and let himself sleep.

In the morning, he would update the spreadsheet. But for now, he had everything he needed.