I saw the lunches alone and the late nights and the way your hands shook after the hard meetings when you thought the room was empty. I didn't have a name for it. I just knew the loneliest person in that whole building was the one at the top. Victoria stared at him. You saw that?
She said for 3 years you saw that and you never she stopped. Everyone in that building would kill to have a private conversation with me. You had a hundred of them in a way. You watched me be human when I thought no one was looking. And you never once used it.
Never came to my office with a favor. Never leveraged it. Never even mentioned it. Wasn't mine to use, Nathan said simply. A person crying when they think they're alone.
That's the most private thing there is. You don't do anything with that except keep it safe. And Victoria Harrington understood, sitting in a folding chair at a children's soccer game in borrowed sweatpants, that she had spent two years with a man who used every vulnerability against her, and had spent one night with a man who'd been quietly guarding hers for 3 years without ever telling her. And the difference between those two things was the difference between everything she'd had and everything she'd wanted. "Gole! " Lily's voice split the air.
"Daddy, I scored. Did you see? Did you see it? I saw it, bug. Nathan was on his feet, hollering both arms up.
That was incredible. That was the best goal I've ever seen in my life. Victoria stood too without deciding to, and found herself cheering for a 7-year-old she'd met 12 hours ago, cheering with her whole chest, and Lily looked over at the sideline and saw them both standing there yelling for her and her face. Nathan would remember it for the rest of his life. And so it turned out would Victoria.
Her face lit up like the whole sun had come out just for her. After the game over juice boxes and orange slices, Lily hurled herself at Victoria and hugged her around the waist, sweaty and triumphant. And Victoria froze for a second. The way people freeze when they're not used to being hugged. And then she carefully, carefully put her arms around the little girl and hugged her back.
And over the top of Lily's head, she looked at Nathan with an expression he couldn't name and didn't try to. That should have been the end of it. A strange, perfect, impossible day. And then Monday would come and Victoria would go back to her tower and her billions, and Nathan would go back to his ladders and his carts, and they'd nod at each other in the elevator. And this whole thing would become a story neither of them ever told anybody.
That's what should have happened. It didn't because as they were walking back to the truck, Lily skipping ahead. Victoria's turned off phone had nothing to do with it, but Nathan's phone rang. He looked at the screen frowned. It's Frank, my supervisor.