Yes, he said. The skeptical pieces too, especially those, he said. She came in and sat in the chair across from his desk. She looked different than she had 6 months ago. Not physically, the changes were not visible in any single feature.
But there was something in the way she occupied the chair, a quality of presence that was less armored than it used to be, less prepared for the room to require her to defend herself at any moment. She had done the work, not perfectly. There had been moments in the past 6 months where the old habits had reemerged. The snap judgment, the closed door, the meeting that ran on autopilot rather than attention. And each time she had caught it herself, or someone had gently called it out, and she had done the uncomfortable thing of acknowledging it and doing it differently, she was learning, not with the speed of someone who had always been fast at things, with the stubbornness of someone who had decided they were not going to stop.
"I had a call with Grace this week," she said. Caleb looked up. "How did it go?" He asked. Better than I expected, Victoria said.
And harder than I expected. Both at the same time. She paused. She's not ready to come back. I don't know if she ever will be, but she said something that I've been thinking about since the call ended.
"What did she say?" She said she doesn't need this company to fix itself for her sake. She's built something good somewhere else. But she said, Victoria stopped for a moment, then continued. She said she has a daughter and her daughter is 12 years old and she is the kind of girl who is going to walk into buildings like this one in about 10 years.
And Grace said she wants to believe that the building her daughter walks into will see her. She paused. She said that's why she agreed to talk to us, not for herself, for her daughter. Caleb was very still. Victoria looked at him.
I thought about Maya when she said it, she said. He nodded slowly. Yeah, he said. They sat with that for a moment, the specific weight of it. Two people in a building that had failed and was trying to be different, thinking about the daughters who would inherit whatever they built or failed to build.
"Are we going to make it?" Victoria asked. "Not the company performance question, the other one." Caleb looked at the drawing on the shelf. I think the question isn't whether we make it, he said.