"Good." Clare picked her pen back up. "Now, do you want to keep working on the board presentation or do you need 20 minutes first?" "I need 20 minutes," he said. He was surprised to hear himself say it.
She nodded. "I'll get more coffee." She got up and walked out of the office, giving him the room. And Malcolm sat alone for 20 minutes and let himself feel the weight of what was actually happening to him, not managing it, not converting it into strategy, just feeling it because Clare had been telling him for 2 weeks that this was something he needed to get better at. And he was trying.
He was doing better at it. That was the honest assessment at the end of week 3's first half. He was not good at it yet. He was not even close to good at it, but he was doing it, which was a significant departure from his baseline of 6 months ago, and he recognized the departure even if he couldn't fully explain it. Clare noticed.
She didn't comment on it directly. That wasn't her style, but he could tell by the way she stopped adding the buffer of an extra question whenever he said something honest. Before. She would follow his candor with a gentle follow-up, a soft probe to make sure he actually meant what he'd said and hadn't just said it because it seemed like the appropriate thing to say. Now she took him at his word more often.
She believed him when he said he was struggling. She didn't need the double check. That shift mattered to him more than he could have explained. The board meeting Thursday was brutal in the way that meetings are brutal when everyone in the room is trying to stay civil. Also being genuinely scared about money.
Gerald opened with the Harwell news. The room went silent in the particular way. Rooms go silent when something concrete and unavoidable has arrived. Two board members left to take phone calls. Harrison cleared his throat three times in rapid succession, which was his tell.
Malcolm made his case when Gerald gave him the floor. He had prepared, but he did not read from notes he had made a decision that morning to speak from the thing he actually knew, which was what the maintenance division did every single day and what it meant to the people who lived in the properties they managed. He talked about the boiler in building 7. He talked about Miss Patterson's phone call. He talked about response time and quality control and the trust that accumulated over years between maintenance staff and residents.
The kind of trust that could not be contracted out and could not be rebuilt once it was broken. When he finished, Harrison said, ""The numbers still need to work, regardless of the human element." "Then let's talk about the numbers," Malcolm said, and he went through them. The deferral savings, the reduction in emergency contractor costs from having an in-house operation, the liability cost of slower third-party response times. He had prepared for Harrison's argument because Clare had helped him prepare for it and having the preparation felt in the room like having someone standing at his back.
The board didn't make a decision that day, but Harrison was quieter in the second half of the meeting than he had been in the first half. Afterward, Gerald stopped Malcolm in the hallway. "That was good," he said. "Don't tell Harrison I said that." Malcolm almost smiled. ""I won't."" He texted Clare from the parking lot.