If Harrison came back with a contracting argument at the next board meeting, Malcolm wanted something in Gerald's hands that would make the board see what they were actually choosing between. He worked on it through lunch. He stayed late to finish it. He was still at his desk at 6:45 when Clare appeared in his doorway. You're still here?
She said, "Finishing something." She came in and looked at his screen. She read for a moment. "Is that the maintenance cost-per-resident breakdown?" She said, "Yeah, can I?" ""Yes."" He moved his chair so she could see the screen properly.
She leaned over his shoulder and read through the document with the focused attention she brought to everything that mattered. He was aware of her proximity in the specific charged way he had been aware of it for the past four weeks, not uncomfortably, but clearly like the difference between ambient temperature and direct sunlight. This line here, she said, pointing where you list the emergency response time comparison. Add a column showing what a third-party contractor's average response time would cost in resident displacement expenses. I have that data from the tenant support side.
Send it to me. She straightened up and was already reaching for her phone. "Give me 10 minutes." 20 minutes later, they were both still in his office. Her standing with her phone, him at the keyboard, building something that was better than what either of them would have built alone.
And this was not a new experience. They had always been better together at work than separately. But it felt newly charged in a way that Malcolm did not try to push down anymore. He let it be what it was. That he was beginning to understand was what getting better at this looked like.
The call from Ava's school came at 10:40 Tuesday morning. Not a crisis call, not the kind that made your blood go cold, but not good call either. Ava had gotten into an argument with a girl in her class named Morgan. And the argument had escalated to the point where Ava had said something sharp enough that her teacher had pulled her out of class and sent her to the counselor's office. Malcolm was on site at a property repair in Vine City.
He took the call, spoke to the school counselor for 4 minutes, and then called his mother to ask if she could pick Ava up early. His mother could. He wrapped up the repair as fast as he reasonably could and drove to his mother's house to meet them. Avis was sitting at the kitchen table when he walked in in her school clothes with her backpack still on, eating a cookie with the deliberately neutral expression of a child who knows she is in some amount of trouble and is managing it by being very still. Malcolm sat down across from her.
"Tell me what happened," he said. Ava looked at the cookie. "Morgan said my family was weird because I only have a dad." Malcolm kept his face still. ""And what did you say?"" "I said, 'At least my dad shows up.'" She said it flatly without effect. She missed the last three games because her parents were fighting.
He sat with that for a moment. Ava, "I know," she said. "I know it was mean. I already know." She looked up at him and her expression had shifted to something younger and less composed than the front she'd been maintaining.