She looked up when Marcus came through the door, and her whole face changed like the sun decided to show up. "Daddy. " She launched herself off the couch. He caught her the way he always did. Easy practiced like he'd been built for it. She wrapped her arms around his neck and he held on a beat longer than strictly necessary, pressing his face briefly into her hair.
Hey, baby girl, you smell like rain. It's raining. She pulled back to look at him. Then she noticed Victoria standing just inside the doorway, shaking water off her blazer with the dignity of someone who was going to act like this had gone exactly according to plan. Ava went completely still.
Who's that? She whispered not quietly enough. That's a colleague from work, Ms. Hart. Ava studied Victoria with the unfiltered assessment only children and animals are capable of.
Why is she here? Because the storm is bad and it wasn't safe to leave her at the warehouse. Ava considered this. Is she going home now? We're going to drop her, Marcus started.
The roads to Buckhead are closed, Victoria said from the doorway. She was looking at her phone with an expression Marcus couldn't immediately interpret. The underpass on I 85 is flooding. They're advising people to avoid the whole corridor. The room went quiet except for the rain.
Marcus looked at his phone. He checked the traffic app. He checked the news. She was right. He stood there for a moment running calculations.
East Point to Buckhead. Every route he knew, everything he understood about how Atlanta drowned in a storm. Then he said the only thing there was to say. "Stay here," he said. "The storm's too bad. " Victoria looked at him and then and he would not forget this as long as he lived.
The corner of her mouth lifted just slightly. "Not a full smile, more like the trace of one. " "Only if I'm not sleeping on the sofa," she said. Ava made a sound that might have been a gasp or might have been the beginning of a laugh. Marcus looked at his daughter. His daughter looked at him, and Victoria Hart stood in the doorway of a house she'd never been in in a life she'd never imagined.
While the storm rolled over Atlanta like it was trying to rearrange everything inside it. He gave her the guest room. It had a bed, a dresser, a small lamp with a slightly crooked shade and a watercolor painting of the ocean that Ava had made in second grade. He set a towel on the end of the bed and found a clean t-shirt and sweatpants his. But she'd have to live with it.
And he knocked on the door when it was ready. She opened it, wearing the blazer, still like she hadn't quite figured out yet what to do with herself. Bathroom's across the hall, he said. Ava's is down at the end. Don't use hers.
She'll inventory everything. Victoria looked at the clothes in his hand. Are those best I've got on short notice. She took them, looked at the sweatpants. LSU, don't judge.
She almost smiled. I went to Georgetown. Of course you did. She caught the edge in it. He could see that she caught it, but she didn't react the way he expected.
She just looked at him for a moment quietly and said, "Thank you, Marcus. " First time she'd used his first name. He nodded once and pulled the door closed. Ava was in the kitchen when he came back downstairs sitting on the counter eating peanut butter crackers and swinging her feet. "Is she staying for dinner? " she asked. Probably.
We only have spaghetti stuff. Spaghetti is fine. Does she like spaghetti? Ava. What?
I'm just asking. She crunched a cracker. She's pretty. She's my boss. You can be both.
He looked at his 8-year-old daughter, who had apparently been raised by someone with more wisdom than he'd realized. Go wash your hands. I didn't touch anything. Go wash your hands. She hopped off the counter, grinning, and disappeared down the hall.
He could hear her humming something to herself the same way she always did, like the house itself was her instrument and she was just playing it. He stood at the stove and started water boiling and tried not to think about the fact that his regional director was upstairs in his guest room in his LSU sweatpants. He lasted about 30 seconds. Then he heard footsteps on the stairs and Victoria came into the kitchen and she looked different. Not less composed exactly, but realer.
The blazer was gone. She'd washed her face. He could tell. She stood in the doorway in the sweatpants and a white t-shirt and her hair pulled back and without the armor of the executive suit, she looked like a person. Just a person.
Can I help? She asked. He almost said no. Automatic reflex. You don't ask your regional director to make spaghetti.
But she wasn't his regional director right now. The storm had made sure of that. Grab the jar on the second shelf, he said instead. Red lid. She moved into the kitchen, found the jar, and stood next to him at the counter without any of the careful distance that defined every interaction they'd ever had in that office building.
She called you pretty, Marcus said. I heard. Victoria opened the jar. She's very direct. That's a polite way to say it.
She gets it from somewhere. He glanced at her sideways. She wasn't looking at him. She was finding a spoon, opening a cabinet on the first try, like she had some instinct for where things lived. What does that mean?
He asked. You told me the parking lot was flooded when nobody else said anything. You told me the roads were closed in time to matter. She handed him the jar. You're direct.
You're just careful about when. He stood there holding the pasta sauce and realized in a way that was slow and strange and slightly alarming that Victoria Hart had been paying attention to him in a way he had not been paying attention to himself. Outside the storm pressed down on Atlanta like a hand. Inside the water came to a boil, and somewhere between the beginning of that evening and the end of it, something shifted in that small house in East Point, quiet as a door opening in the dark, significant as everything that comes after. Dinner was louder than Marcus expected.
That was the first thing that surprised him. He had prepared himself for awkward silence, the kind that settles over a table when two people have nothing to say to each other, and a child is the only thing standing between them, and the full weight of that silence. He had lived through enough uncomfortable dinners in his life to know exactly how they felt. The two careful way people passed things. The overpolite comments about food.
The way everyone pretended not to notice how badly they wanted the meal to be over. That was not what happened. What happened was Ava. She started talking before Marcus even set the bowl of spaghetti on the table. And she did not stop for approximately 45 minutes covering topics that included but were not limited to her class Hamster Gerald who had escaped twice and been found once inside a sneaker, the unfairness of long division, a documentary she had watched about penguins that had made her cry, her theory that clouds had feelings, and a detailed breakdown of why her teacher, Mr.