He didn't put his head down. He sat there for about 6 minutes looking at a shopping cart somebody had left against the curb. Then he squared the papers, put them back in the plastic bin, drove to the school, and was in the pickup line 4 minutes early. He didn't tell Ray. He didn't tell Marcus.
He didn't tell Catherine. It came apart in the last week of October. One of Whitmore's soft yeses went quiet and then went the other way after two phone calls from the board chair, and a piece of language started circulating in the memos that the chief executive's personal circumstances had begun to influence her judgment that there were questions about discretion. Margarite's phone had a camera on it. The photographs weren't of anything.
A truck in a driveway at 7:00 in the evening, a man carrying a toolbox up the front steps, a man and a woman on a tailgate with two bottles. But they went to Richard and Richard's attorney, looked at them and saw a filing. Richard, who had started calling his daughter without going through anyone, sat with them for 2 days before he did anything at all. Daniel found out from Catherine on a Wednesday, and by Thursday he had stopped coming to the house outside working hours. He thought he was doing the only decent thing available.
Catherine came out to the truck on Friday and told him what it actually looked like. "You decided this," she said. "You decided what was good for me, and you didn't ask." "How is that different from every other person in my life right now? I'm not afraid of what they think about me," Daniel said.
"I'm afraid they'll use me to hurt you and Lily." "That's still you deciding for me." He stood there with the tarp half over the bed and found that she was right and that he had nothing to put in front of it. Before either of them could get any further, his phone buzzed with a message from the agent on Delaney Street. There was an accepted offer.
Papers were moving. Noah asked that night whether they could drive over and look at it one more time. Daniel said no. He said there was no point opening a thing you couldn't change. Then at 9:00 on the night before the board vote, he found himself parked on Delaney Street anyway with his son beside him.
Both of them looking at a faded sign over a papered window. If they knock it down, Noah said, "Are we still Mercer and son?" Daniel opened his mouth. The phone lit up on the dash. Catherine, he picked up and she didn't ask where he was.