A black man in her car at midnight. That was all it had taken. She stood up, walked to the window, stood there looking out at the city not seeing it. Just needing somewhere to put her eyes while her mind moved. She thought about Marcus's voice in the car.
"Is that the kind of CEO you are?" She thought about the way he'd taken her cups to the kitchen sink without being asked. Because that was just who he was. She thought about what she'd been told and what she'd seen with her own eyes. And how those two things were not remotely the same picture.
She picked up her phone. Her thumb moved to Marcus's number. She stopped. He'd told her to let it be noise. He'd told her that responding confirmed that it was worth responding to.
He was right. She knew he was right. But the Monday session was not noise anymore. She put the phone down. She would wait until morning.
She would think it through clearly without the exhaustion and the anger pulling her in different directions. She would be strategic. She lasted until 6:15 before she called him. Marcus picked up on the second ring, which told her he was already awake, which told her more than he probably intended. "They called an emergency board sitting for Monday," she said.
"No preamble. He'd know what she meant, I know," he said. A beat. "You know, Kelner called me Friday evening," Marcus said. "Before he messaged you."
The silence that followed was so complete that she could hear her own pulse. "He called you." "He suggested I might want to consider a voluntary transition," Marcus said. His voice was steady. Flat in the way voices get when they are working to stay that way.
"He framed it as being in everyone's best interest." "Marcus, I told him no." Something moved through Claire that she didn't have a name for in the moment. Something that was partly relief and partly a kind of anguish and partly something that felt uncomfortably close to gratitude, but bigger than that. More structural than that.
Like the feeling you get when you realize a wall you were leaning on is actually load-bearing. "You should have told me," she said. "I needed to understand what I was looking at before I brought it to you." "And do you understand what you're looking at?" A pause.
"Yes." His voice had changed. Not louder, not harder, but certain in a way that made her stand up straighter without knowing why. "Tell me," she said. "Not on the phone," Marcus said.