Infinite Cashback System

Chapter 371: 371 | My Girlfriend’s Due Diligence is Terrifying

The walk from the Partners statue to Blue Bayou took eleven minutes through the thickening evening crowd, and Jordan spent approximately nine of those minutes processing the fact that his sociology TA was now part of his dinner plans.

Isabella Rossi walked three paces ahead with Sofia balanced on her hip, navigating the crowd with the instinct of someone who’d spent years reading foot traffic the way Maya read telegraphed punches.

She moved through gaps that hadn’t fully opened yet, anticipating the flow of strollers and photo-stopping tourists and rerouting before congestion formed.

Sofia had stopped crying entirely and was now providing a running commentary on every character she spotted, her voice carrying the absolute conviction of a four-year-old who believed the adults in costume were the actual fictional characters and would tolerate no arguments to the contrary.

"That Goofy is TALL, Mama."

"He is, baby."

"Taller than the big boy?"

Isabella glanced back at Jordan over her shoulder. Her dark eyes tracked from his feet to the Mickey ears still perched on his head, and her mouth curved with something between assessment and amusement. "Close. I think the big boy might have Goofy beat."

Sofia considered this with the gravity of a Supreme Court justice weighing constitutional implications. "Good. Goofy walks funny. The big boy walks normal."

Jordan had never received a compliment that felt more backhanded and more sincere at the same time. He filed it under REVIEWS: MIXED alongside Kumiko’s observation that he made faces like a hotel brochure and Chloe’s recurring note that he smelled like decisions she’d regret.

Kumiko walked on his left side with her arm threaded through his, her pink sundress swishing against his jeans with each step. The loss of Detective Blueberry had produced no visible grief, which told Jordan everything he needed to know about Kumiko’s hierarchy of emotional priorities.

A four-year-old stranger in a Belle dress had outranked a thirty-nine-dollar plush in under sixty seconds. Kumiko hummed something Japanese under her breath, her ribbons bouncing in time with a beat only she could hear.

Chloe occupied his right side without physical contact, maintaining the precise two-inch gap she kept in public spaces where cameras might exist. Her phone was out, her thumb scrolling through something on the Disneyland app with clinical focus.

She hadn’t spoken since confirming the reservation, but her silence carried the specific density of active computation, like a server room running hot behind a closed door.

"She’s a sociologist," Chloe said.

Jordan waited.

"Not a professor. A PhD candidate. TA for Delgado’s section, which means she grades our participation and runs the Wednesday discussion you’ve never attended." Chloe’s thumb stopped scrolling. "She’s published in three journals. Her thesis is about dismantling social hierarchies through what she calls ’applied provocation.’ She views human social groups as systems that can be reverse-engineered and rebuilt."

"You Googled her."

"I Googled her in the time it took Sofia to describe the butterfly. Forty-seven seconds."

"That’s terrifying."

"That’s preparedness." Chloe locked her phone and slipped it into her back pocket. "She’s brilliant, she’s unconventional, and she just watched you fix a crying child’s tiara while wearing Mickey ears and standing between two girlfriends. If you think she’s not going to spend the entire dinner running experiments on our group dynamic, you haven’t been paying attention to her face."

Jordan had been paying attention to her face. That was part of the problem.

Isabella Rossi had the kind of features that belonged in a European film from the 1960s, all cheekbones and intelligence and a mouth that defaulted to a half-smile suggesting she knew something you hadn’t figured out yet.

The worn leather messenger bag slung over one shoulder gave her the vibe of a war correspondent who’d just arrived from somewhere more interesting than Anaheim.

Her black V-neck fit well without trying to fit well, which somehow made it worse, and the way her jeans sat on her hips suggested she spent exactly zero minutes per day thinking about her own body while her body went ahead and existed at full volume anyway.

She was twenty-nine. She had a four-year-old. She was his TA.

Jordan’s brain flagged all three of these facts as relevant safety information and then proceeded to ignore them entirely, which was becoming a pattern he should probably address with a professional at some point.

They entered New Orleans Square through the wrought-iron archway, and the atmosphere shifted. Gas lamps flickered along the walkways. Jazz drifted from somewhere inside the buildings.

The air smelled different here, heavier and warmer, carrying notes of beignets and something floral that Jordan’s nose registered as either jasmine or a very expensive air diffuser system designed to make people spend money on things they didn’t need.

Blue Bayou occupied a space that shouldn’t have existed. The restaurant sat inside the Pirates of the Caribbean building, its tables arranged along a simulated riverbank beneath a permanent artificial night sky dotted with fiber-optic stars.

Ride boats drifted past on dark water twenty feet away, carrying passengers who peered at the diners with the confused envy of people realizing they could have been eating instead of sitting in a log flume. Fireflies blinked in the fake trees overhead.

The ambient cricket sounds were piped through hidden speakers at a frequency calibrated to produce calm, which Jordan assumed also produced willingness to pay forty-eight dollars for a Monte Cristo sandwich.

The hostess led them to a table along the water’s edge, close enough that the gentle splash of the ride boats created a constant low soundtrack beneath the dinner conversation.

Sofia demanded the chair closest to the water and received it without opposition from any adult present. The hostess distributed menus, lit the table’s candle, and vanished with professional invisibility.

Jordan pulled out chairs.

One for Chloe, who sat with practiced grace and immediately opened the menu.

One for Kumiko, who sat and then rotated her entire body toward the water, transfixed by the ride boats passing through the blue-lit cavern beyond the railing.

One for Isabella, who settled Sofia into a booster seat with the efficiency of a woman who’d done this eight hundred times and still found it annoying. Isabella dropped the Rapunzel backpack beneath the table and pushed her hair behind both ears with a sigh that contained the compressed exhaustion of solo parenting at a theme park for eleven hours.

"Thank God," Isabella said, and the relief in her voice was so genuine it bordered on religious.

"Mama said a bad word," Sofia announced to the table.

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