That leaves you 4 days before the event. Three, she corrected. I need a full day to brief the board members who aren't in his pocket before the event or I walk into that room without allies. 3 days, he said. She looked at him.
Yes. They were both doing the same math and arriving at the same answer, which was, "It was possible." Barely with no margin for error and no additional surprises. Okay, Marcus said he stood up. Then you need to start on the term sheet now.
Today he was halfway to the door when she said Marcus. He stopped yesterday. She said what you said before Hawthorne's call came in. He turned around. She was looking at him with the unguarded expression, the one that had no professional layer over it.
The one he had only seen twice both times in rooms that had changed something permanent between them. I meant what I said, she told him. Me, too. I want you to know it wasn't. I want you to know I've been aware of what this is for longer than yesterday.
She paused. I'm not good at this at saying things that don't have a strategic framework around them. You're doing fine, he said quietly. I'm a disaster, she said with a brief, rofal honesty that was somehow more attractive than anything composed she had ever said in his presence. I run a billion-dollar company and I cannot manage a conversation about my own feelings without preparing remarks in advance.
I fixed a zipper and asked if you wanted it up or down, he said. I'm not in a position to judge. She laughed. It was the real one, the short surprised one he had heard in the breakroom when Ava called her the boss. It lasted only a second, but it broke something open in the room and they were both aware of it.
After the event, she said, "Whatever happens, I want to have a different conversation, a real one, without a board meeting about to start or a crisis in the server room." After the event, he agreed. He left. He spent the rest of that day and the next three days doing two things simultaneously and he was methodical about both. The first was his job.
His actual job which he performed with the same thoroughess and care that he always brought to it because that was who he was and a crisis in his personal life was not a reason to let a building suffer. He finished the third floor pressure fix. He completed a full safety inspection of the parking structure that he'd been scheduling around for 2 weeks. He managed his crew, answered their questions, signed off on their work orders, and showed up for every task that bore his name. The second thing he did was think.
He thought about Ava's question at the breakfast table. Are you fine? He thought about the worn paperback on her nightstand. He thought about Angela, which he still did every day, but differently now, not with the consuming, directionless grief of the first year, not even with the quieter ache of the second and third years. He thought about her with a specific kind of honesty that he hadn't fully allowed himself before.
He thought about what she would say to him right now. He knew exactly what she would say. She would say, "Baby, why are you waiting?" He had been waiting because he was afraid. He understood that clearly now in a way that he hadn't let himself understand it before.
He had been telling himself that the distance between who he was and who Victoria deserved was a fact of fixed measurement and honest assessment. But it wasn't. It was fear wearing the costume of humility. It was grief wearing the costume of practicality. It was a man who had been hurt very deeply by loss, telling himself that the safest way to avoid being hurt again was to stand slightly to the side of everything real.
He had been invisible in that building for three years, not because no one saw him, because he had made himself that way. On the fourth day, two days before the announcement event, Hawthorne made his move. Marcus was on the 21st floor running a routine inspection when his phone buzzed with a text from a number he didn't have saved. The message was brief. It said, "Mr.
Reed, I'd like to speak with you. I'll be in the lobby cafe at noon." R Hawthorne. Marcus looked at the text for a long time. Then he texted Victoria.
Hawthorne wants to meet today at noon. Her response came in under 30 seconds. Don't go alone. Tell Clare, I'll have someone present. He typed back, I'll go alone.
Three dots appeared. Disappeared. Appeared again. Then Marcus. He typed, "I've been fixing problems in this building for 11 years without backup.
I'll be fine." A long pause. Then tell me everything after. He went to the lobby cafe at noon. Hawthorne was already there at a corner table.
Two coffees already on the surface. He looked relaxed in the way that certain men look relaxed when they believe they hold every card in the deck. He gestured to the chair across from him with a kind of casual authority that Marcus recognized and refused to respond to. He sat down, didn't touch the coffee. Mr.
Reed, Hawthorne said. Thank you for coming. Mr. Hawthorne, Marcus said. What do you want?
Hawthorne smiled, not unpleasantly. Directness. I appreciate that. He folded his hands on the table. I want to have an honest conversation with you as two men outside of any institutional context.
All right. Marcus said, "You're important to Victoria." Hawthorne said, "She trusts you in a way that she doesn't trust many people. I've observed that. I'm not a fool, Mr.