Pride wasn't quite it because he hadn't done any of it she had. But it was close to pride. It was the feeling of watching someone you care about become in real time the person they were always supposed to be. He'd told her to save herself and from 20 ft away invisible up a ladder. He was watching her do it.
And it was the most beautiful thing he'd ever watched. Lily asked about her constantly. When's your friend coming back? The sad one. The one who was bad at coloring.
I don't know, Bug. Is she still sad? Nathan thought about it. No, he said. I don't think she's sad anymore.
I think she's getting happy. It just takes a while. Sometimes getting happy is slower than getting sad. That's dumb. It should be the other way.
Yeah, Nathan agreed. It should be, but it's not. Lily made her a drawing anyway, unprompted. Came home from school one day with a folded piece of construction paper and announced it was for the friend for when she came back and Nathan should keep it safe. It was a picture of three people, a big stick figure, a medium stick figure with long hair, and a small stick figure in between them holding both their hands under a wobbly rainbow.
Nathan looked at it for a long time. Then he put it on the refrigerator under a magnet where it stayed. He didn't tell Lily what it meant. He wasn't sure Lily knew what it meant, but he knew. 2 and 1/2 months after the night in the rain on an ordinary Tuesday, Nathan was up a ladder in the corner of the 14th floor conference room, replacing a ceiling vent exactly where he'd been the first time he ever saw Victoria Harrington cry.
He didn't hear the door open. He was focused on the vent. Both hands up over his head screwdriver in his teeth. And a voice behind him from the doorway said, "You know, I've been trying to figure out how to do this for a week, and it turns out the answer was just to walk down here and find you up a ladder exactly where you said you'd be. " Nathan nearly dropped the screwdriver. He came down off the ladder slowly and turned around, and there she was, Victoria Harrington, but not the one from the restaurant, and not the one from his kitchen either.
Somebody new, somebody who stood differently. She was dressed for work, sharp as ever, but the sharpness sat differently on her. Now it was armor she was choosing to wear. Not armor she was hiding inside. Her face was rested.
Her eyes, Lily's words came back to him. She has sad eyes. Even when she laughs, her eyes weren't sad. That was the whole difference. And it was the difference between a stranger and the person she was meant to be.