I want her to know her dad cheated. He went quiet for exactly one second and then he laughed a short caught sound that seemed to surprise him. She would love that actually. She would think it was excellent strategy. She sounds smart.
She is. He said you'd like her. Norah thought about a seven-year-old who had excessive confidence in her pool game and thought elaborate setups were excellent strategy. She thought she probably would. Okay, she said.
Marcus looked at her. Okay, the other thing she said, you still have to collect. He took a breath, just a small one. Not dramatic. The kind that means you've been patient for a while and that's worked out.
And he stepped forward and Norah Chin did not move and Marcus Webb kissed her on a Chicago sidewalk in late September with exactly as much care as he did everything else. It lasted long enough. When it ended, she looked at him and said, "9 months, I know," he said. "You're insufferable." "I know," he said and smiled and didn't apologize. Monday arrived the way Monday's always did at Mercer and Holt with a 7:45 email from Diane Russo that used the phrase circling back four times and ended with let's touch base EOD which meant everyone on the team would spend the first hour trying to figure out what exactly they were circling back to.
Norah was already at her desk by 8, coffee in hand when Marcus walked in. He came through the glass doors the way he always did, jacket over one arm, bag over the other shoulder, stopping at the kitchen to pour his own coffee before heading to his desk. He looked exactly like he always did. Nothing about him telegraphed Saturday night or Sunday morning or the fact that they'd spent most of Sunday on the phone talking about nothing in particular, which had turned out to be an extremely specific kind of nothing that lasted 3 hours. He walked past her desk.
He said, "Morning," she said. "Morning." and looked back at her screen. That was it. Clean, easy, professional. Work was work.
They'd agreed. What she hadn't anticipated was how much energy it would take to not look up every time she heard his chair move across the floor. She anticipated it by Tuesday. The Weston account was in its final stretch 2 weeks out from the client presentation, which meant the team was running on the particular fuel of deadline pressure and Diane's optimism, which were not always compatible. Norah and Marcus were handling the financial modeling section, which required approximately 400 hours of cross- referencing and one locked conference room, which Mercer and Hol had exactly one of, and which you had to book 3 days in advance, unless you knew that it was almost always empty after 5.
Tuesday at 5:30, Marcus knocked on the glass. She waved him in. He set his laptop down across from her, plugged in, and they worked for 2 hours straight without saying anything that wasn't about the western numbers. This was not unusual. This was in fact the reason the complimentary skill sets thing had worked from the beginning.
They could both go quiet into the work. And the quiet wasn't uncomfortable. And the reemergence from the work into talking felt natural in a way that she'd never managed with a work partner before. At 7:40, he said, "This projection for Q2 is wrong." She leaned across the table to look. Where?
He pointed. She looked. He was right. She'd pulled from the wrong source column and the variance was going to cascade sideways through two more taps. I hate this spreadsheet.
She said, "I know. I built this spreadsheet. I know. She fixed it." He watched her fix it. Not the hovering kind of watching, just present.
When she finished, he said, "Better." And she said, "Obviously." And he smiled at his screen. That was Tuesday. Wednesday was the Diane meeting which was the meeting about the meeting which was standard Mercer and whole procedure one meeting to discuss the meeting that would discuss the presentation attended by Nora Marcus and a third analyst named Priya Sharma who had been on the account for 6 months and had the particular energy of someone who tracked every detail and said little and knew exactly what everyone else had missed. Prius sat to Norah's left. Marcus sat across.
Diane talked for 40 minutes about stakeholder alignment. Marcus kept his eyes on the meeting notes and made occasional comments that were precise and correct. Priya asked three questions that revealed she had read the full Western account history going back 2 years, which everyone else had been pretending to have done. Norah had genuinely done it. So she and Priya ended up in an impromptu exchange about client risk tolerance that Diane called great energy and Marcus called later in the hallway the most efficient 5 minutes of that meeting.
She's sharp. Norah said about Priya. She is Marcus said she also knows about the Q1 issue. Norah looked at him. The Q1 issue was a revenue recognition discrepancy that she'd flagged internally 3 weeks ago and that Marcus had looked at and said needed to go to the partner level.
It had gone to the partner level. The partner level was their boss's boss, a man named Grant Ellison, who had the specific quality of seeming very engaged with problems while doing very little about them. What does she know about it? Norah asked. Same thing we know.
She just hasn't said it out loud yet. Why not? He glanced over. Probably for the same reason we've been careful about it, which was Grant Ellison had brought Weston in. Weston was the kind of account that got cited in presentations.
Raising a concern about Weston's numbers was raising a concern about Grant's judgment. And raising a concern about Grant's judgment at Mercer and Hol was the kind of thing that happened once. Norah had thought about this. She'd thought about it when she flagged it, and she'd thought about it since. She'd framed the flag carefully.
She'd used the word discrepancy instead of error. She'd CCed Marcus. Grant had acknowledged it in an email. The email had said, "Thanks for flagging. We're monitoring." Monitoring.
It had been 3 weeks. The presentation's in 12 days, she said. Marcus said, "I know." She looked at him. "What do you want to do? I want to know what the number actually is before we stand in front of the client." And if Grant still monitoring, he was quiet for a second.
The kind that meant he was choosing words. Then I think we talked to Priya. Nora hadn't expected that. She'd expected the version where they handled it internally, the two of them, the way they'd handled most things. She turned this over.
Why, Priya? Because she already sees it. Because if we're going to push on this before the presentation, two people are better than one, and she's not the kind of person who talks before she's ready. He paused. And because she's right, this was the thing about Marcus that she was still calibrating, he was not, as she'd sometimes thought in the early months.