She thought about this with the seriousness she brought to most things. "Okay," she said. "Can we make biscuits at home?" "Yeah," he said. "We can make biscuits at home."
He carried her to the car. She talked the whole way home about her grandmother's cat and a show she'd watched and something her friend Maya had said that Amara had found philosophically questionable. Marcus listened and answered and drove. And the weekend that had contained the most constant 48 hours of his adult professional life Brits life quietly folded itself into a Sunday afternoon of biscuits and 9-year-old's running commentary on the world. He needed that.
He hadn't known how much he needed it until he was inside it. Monday came. Marcus was at the curb at 7:30. Claire came out of the building at 7:45, 5 minutes later than usual, and he could see from the way she walked that she had not slept. She was still precise, still composed, still dressed for a battlefield, but she was running on the particular fuel of someone who has been awake long enough that the exhaustion has gone all the way through and come out the other side as a kind of crystalline terrible clarity.
She got in the car, he pulled into traffic. She didn't open her laptop. After a while, she said, "Hartwell resigned last night. Sent a one-paragraph letter to the board chair at 11:00 p. m." Marcus absorbed that.
Hartwell had been the quieter of the three, the one who'd followed Kelner's lead more than driven it himself. He'd seen the disclosure, done the math, and made the calculation that distance was cheaper than loyalty. "And Kelner?" "Still there," she said. "He'll be in that room this morning.
He won't go quietly. You didn't expect him to." A pause. "Forsyth called me this morning, 6:00 a. m. She was crying.
She said her husband had never told her about his advisory role with the competing group. That she hadn't known there was a conflict." Claire was quiet for a moment. "I believe her," she said. "I think she was used.
What are you going to do?" "I'm going to let the governance review determine that," she said. "That's the point of having a process. You don't get to be the judge of your own case." Marcus glanced at her in the mirror.
"Even when you know the answer?" "Especially then," she said. And it was the same phrase he'd used on Saturday, almost word for word, and they both recognized it at the same moment. Something moved between them. There and gone.
"You'll be fine in there," he said. "I "I she said, and then quietly it helps knowing you're out here." Marcus kept his eyes on the road. "I'll be here." He pulled up to the building.