"Yeah, call your lawyer tomorrow. Handle the legal side properly," she looked at him. And then let yourself be scared about it for a few hours without turning it into a project. """Okay." Ava needs you to be able to handle both at the same time." He nodded.
She walked to her car. He stood on the sidewalk watching her go and he did not turn away until her tail lights disappeared around the corner. Then he stood there for another minute by himself. Then he went to get his own car and drove home. The second week of the agreement moved differently from the first.
The first week had been about negotiating the new frequency, adjusting to the fact that what had always been between them was now visible, acknowledged, given a name, even if that name was only 6 weeks. The second week was about something harder. What it looked like when real life kept happening inside the experiment. The boiler in building seven of Cornerstone's residential properties gave out completely on a Tuesday, which meant 12 families without heat, while Atlanta had its first genuinely cold snap of the fall, which meant Malcolm spending 27 hours coordinating emergency repairs while simultaneously navigating a supplier who had the wrong parts and a property management vendor who wanted to charge the nonprofit for an emergency callout fee. That was nowhere in their contract.
He did not sleep Tuesday night. He barely slept Wednesday. By Thursday morning, he was running on coffee and functional adrenaline and the particular grim efficiency that kicks in when you have been managing crises long enough that crisis starts to feel like your natural environment. Clare called him at 7:45 Thursday morning. "Where are you?"
She said. "Building 7, supply room." He had a clipboard in one hand and a work order in the other. And he was reading the third version of a parts delivery confirmation that still did not confirm what time the parts were actually arriving. I've been here since yesterday afternoon.
"Have you eaten?" "I had a granola bar." "When?" He thought about it. "Yesterday morning, probably."
A silence on the line that communicated several things without using any words. "I'm fine." "Malcolm, I'm bringing you breakfast. Don't say no." "You have a 9:30 with the board."
"I'll make it by 9:30. Don't say no, Malcolm. I'm already in the car." He stopped arguing. Partly because he genuinely didn't have the bandwidth for an argument, and partly because she had already hung up.
She arrived 22 minutes later with a bag from a Jamaican spot two blocks from her apartment. Rice and peas and ackee and saltfish wrapped in foil and two large coffees and the unhurried manner of someone who was doing something practical and didn't need it to be a moment. She found him in the supply room still on the phone with the parts supplier. She set the food down on the desk, poured half the coffee into a mug she found on the shelf she didn't ask. She'd been in this supply room enough times to know where things lived and sat down on the edge of the desk and waited for him to finish the call.