The question is whether we deserve to, he paused. And the only way to deserve it is to keep doing the work on the days when it's hard and unglamorous and when nobody's watching, and when it would be easier to declare it finished and move on. Victoria looked at the drawing, too. She thinks you fixed it, she said. She's seven, he said.
She's also right. Victoria said, "About the part that matters. About the part where her father walked into a building and refused to let it stay the way it was." He looked at Diane's photograph. "I had help," he said.
Victoria followed his gaze to the photograph. She had seen it before. It had been on the shelf since the first week he'd moved into this office. She had never asked about it, and he had never offered, and the photograph had simply been part of the room, the way certain things become part of a space without needing to be explained. "She looks like Maya," Victoria said.
"Yes," he said. "She always did." The silence that followed was the good kind, the kind that doesn't need to be filled, that holds something without crushing it. After a while, Victoria stood. I have a 3:00, she said.
Go, he said. At the door, she stopped. It had become a pattern between them. The pause at the door, the thing that needed to be said before the conversation fully ended. He had come to expect it.
"Thank you," she said. He looked at her, for not walking away when you had every reason to, she said. For believing the company could come back to something worth believing in. She paused. And for giving me the chance to be part of what it comes back to instead of just the reason it had to.
He held her gaze. "Don't thank me," he said. "Prove it." She nodded once and she went to her 3:00. He turned back to his desk.
Outside the window, the building street was doing what it always did in the afternoon, filling with the motion of people coming and going, arrivals and departures. The constant turnover of a city that did not pause to consider the significance of any individual moment. But inside the building, something was different than it had been a year ago. It was not fixed. It would not be fixed.