"Text me when you have confirmation." She left. He stood in the supply room with the half-eaten food and the large coffee and the slightly stunned feeling of a man who keeps discovering something obvious about his own life one piece at a time. The board meeting was rough. Malcolm heard about it from a colleague two hours later.
Harrison had in fact pushed the restructuring argument again, suggesting that the maintenance division's emergency cost made it a liability worth contracting out to a third-party facilities company. Clare had, according to the colleague, disassembled this argument so thoroughly and calmly that Harrison had ended the meeting looking like a man who had tried to cut down a tree with a butter knife. Malcolm texted her. Heard you took Harrison apart in there. Her response came 4 minutes later.
"He had a bad argument. Bad arguments don't survive contact with data." Then parts arrive 20 minutes out. "Good." Go fix the boiler.
He smiled at his phone. Alone in the hallway of building 7. And then he went to fix the boiler. The end of week two hit Malcolm in a way he had not prepared for. Saturday night.
Ava was in bed. Malcolm was at his kitchen table with a glass of water and his laptop open to a legal advice website reading through an article about interstate custody modification procedures. And the farther he read, the tighter the feeling in his chest got. He called Clare at 10:15. "I know it's late," he said when she picked up.
"It's fine." Her voice had the texture of someone who had been quietly settled into an evening. "What's happening?" I've been reading about custody modification law for 2 hours and I've now officially frightened myself more than I had any intention of doing. ""Okay."" He heard her shift. She was on the phone somewhere comfortable.
Probably her couch. Maybe her bed. Tell me what you read. Basically, if Diane petitions for a modification based on my work schedule and what she calls the instability of my job demands, a judge could take it seriously. It doesn't mean she wins, but it means it becomes a fight.
It means positions. It means a guardian ad litem getting involved potentially. It means—" "It means you have to stop reading legal advice websites at 10:00 at night," Clare said. He laughed despite himself. It was a short laugh, not entirely happy, but real.
"I'm not in a good place right now," he said. I know. I keep I keep doing this thing where I try to work out every worst case outcome in advance so I can be prepared for it and it's just he stopped. It's exhausting and it doesn't even work. You can't prepare for everything.