The Notice Period

Valentina announced her resignation in the least dramatic way imaginable — a company-wide email with the subject line "Transition Update," sent at 9:04 on a Tuesday. It thanked everyone for "an incredible two years" in language so corporately neutral that Silas read it three times before the actual content landed. She was leaving. In two weeks. For a company across town that, everyone agreed at lunch, sounded like a genuinely better opportunity, which made it substantially harder to resent.

Valentina mengumumkan pengunduran dirinya dengan cara paling tidak dramatis yang bisa dibayangkan, surel untuk seluruh perusahaan dengan subjek "Pembaruan Transisi," terkirim pukul 9.04 pada hari Selasa. Surel itu berterima kasih kepada semua orang atas "dua tahun yang luar biasa" dengan bahasa yang begitu netral ala korporasi sampai Silas membacanya tiga kali sebelum isi sebenarnya meresap. Valentina akan pergi. Dalam dua minggu. Ke perusahaan di seberang kota yang, menurut kesepakatan semua orang saat makan siang, kedengarannya peluang yang benar-benar lebih baik, sehingga jauh lebih sulit untuk merasa kesal.

Silas had spent roughly eighteen months constructing an elaborate, entirely private theory that there was something unspoken between them. The theory was built on shared eye-rolls during meetings, a running joke about the office coffee machine's personality disorders, and one memorably charged argument about whether a hot dog constitutes a sandwich. That argument had somehow lasted forty minutes and ended in neither of them backing down. Had anyone asked him to produce actual evidence of mutual interest beyond this, he would have struggled. Fourteen days, he now realized with something close to panic, was not a generous window in which to convert a hot-dog argument into an actual conversation.

Silas telah menghabiskan sekitar delapan belas bulan membangun teori yang rumit dan sepenuhnya pribadi bahwa ada sesuatu yang tak terucapkan di antara mereka. Teori itu dibangun dari saling memutar bola mata dalam rapat, lelucon berulang tentang kelainan kepribadian mesin kopi kantor, dan satu perdebatan penuh ketegangan yang tak terlupakan tentang apakah hot dog termasuk sandwich. Perdebatan itu entah bagaimana berlangsung empat puluh menit dan berakhir tanpa salah satu dari mereka mengalah. Seandainya ada yang memintanya menunjukkan bukti nyata ketertarikan timbal balik di luar itu, ia akan kesulitan. Empat belas hari, ia kini sadar dengan sesuatu yang mendekati panik, bukanlah waktu yang longgar untuk mengubah perdebatan hot dog menjadi percakapan sungguhan.

His first attempt, on day eleven, involved lingering by her desk with a coffee he didn't need and an opening line: "So, big changes." It was so devastatingly unoriginal that he abandoned the whole enterprise before she'd even fully turned around.

Upaya pertamanya, pada hari kesebelas, berupa berlama-lama di dekat mejanya dengan kopi yang tidak ia butuhkan dan kalimat pembuka: "Jadi, perubahan besar ya." Kalimat itu begitu memalukan tidak orisinalnya sampai ia meninggalkan seluruh usaha itu bahkan sebelum Valentina sempat berbalik sepenuhnya.

"Did you want something," Valentina asked, "or are you just supervising my desk plant?"

"Kamu mau sesuatu," tanya Valentina, "atau cuma sedang mengawasi tanaman di mejaku?"

"The plant looked concerning. I was monitoring it out of civic duty."

"Tanamannya kelihatan mengkhawatirkan. Aku memantaunya sebagai kewajiban warga."

"It's fake, Silas."

"Itu palsu, Silas."

"Then it's thriving," he said, and fled.

"Kalau begitu dia tumbuh subur," katanya, lalu kabur.

What finally forced the issue was not, in the end, any plan of his. It was Valentina herself, appearing at his desk on the Thursday before her last day with two coffees. Her expression suggested she had, in fact, noticed the eighteen months of hovering and had simply been waiting to see whether he'd ever manage a full sentence about it.

Yang akhirnya memaksa semuanya bukanlah, pada akhirnya, rencana apa pun darinya. Melainkan Valentina sendiri, muncul di mejanya pada hari Kamis sebelum hari terakhirnya dengan dua cangkir kopi. Ekspresinya menunjukkan bahwa ia memang telah menyadari delapan belas bulan berkeliaran itu dan hanya menunggu untuk melihat apakah Silas akan pernah sanggup mengucapkan satu kalimat utuh tentangnya.

"You've had two weeks," she said, setting one coffee down in front of him, "to say literally anything real, and instead I've gotten concerned plant surveillance and a truly unhinged hot-dog opinion."

"Kamu punya dua minggu," katanya, meletakkan satu kopi di depan Silas, "untuk mengatakan apa pun yang sungguhan, dan yang kudapat malah pengawasan tanaman yang penuh perhatian dan opini hot dog yang benar-benar gila."

"The hot-dog opinion was correct."

"Opini hot dog itu benar."

"It was not. But that's not actually why I'm here." She sat, uninvited, on the edge of his desk. "I'm leaving Friday. I'd rather not spend my last two days wondering whether you were ever going to say something, so — is there something?"

"Salah. Tapi bukan itu alasan aku ke sini." Ia duduk, tanpa dipersilakan, di tepi meja Silas. "Aku pergi hari Jumat. Aku tidak mau menghabiskan dua hari terakhirku bertanya-tanya apakah kamu akan pernah mengatakan sesuatu, jadi, ada sesuatu?"

Rarely had a question been posed with quite so little patience for a bad answer, and Silas, for once, didn't try to find one. "There's something," he said. "I've just been extremely committed to a coffee-and-plant-based strategy instead of saying it."

Jarang sekali sebuah pertanyaan diajukan dengan begitu sedikit kesabaran terhadap jawaban yang buruk, dan Silas, untuk sekali ini, tidak mencoba mencarinya. "Ada," katanya. "Aku hanya sangat berkomitmen pada strategi berbasis kopi dan tanaman alih-alih mengatakannya."

"Noted for next time," she said. "Assuming there's a next time."

"Dicatat untuk lain kali," katanya. "Kalau memang ada lain kali."

"There'd better be," he said. "I still have four days to make the hot-dog case properly."

"Harus ada," kata Silas. "Aku masih punya empat hari untuk menyampaikan argumen hot dog dengan benar."