Means you get to fall apart." "Says who?" She blinked. "Excuse me?" "Says who?"
he repeated the same way. No louder. Who made that rule? She opened her mouth. Closed it.
Actually thought about it. And he could see the moment she realized she didn't have a real answer. Just a collection of assumptions she'd been operating inside for so long they had the weight of fact. "Everyone expects. Everyone expects what you've trained them to expect."
Marcus said. "That's different." The room went quiet again. But this time it wasn't the silence of two people avoiding something. It was the silence of one person sitting inside a truth they just heard for the first time.
Claire Whitmore pressed her lips together and looked at the ceiling and blinked three times in quick succession. The way people do when they are fighting something that is trying very hard to come out. She didn't cry. She wasn't going to cry, but she came close enough that Marcus looked away not out of discomfort, but out of respect, giving her the private second she needed. When he looked back, she had composed herself.
The mask was halfway back on, but crooked. And somehow that crooked mask was more honest than anything he'd seen from her in 4 months of working in the same building. "You have a daughter," she said. It wasn't a question. She'd read his personnel file at some point.
He'd assumed as much. "Amara. She's nine. What's she like?" And Marcus smiled the kind of smile that comes from a place so genuine it has no performance in it at all.
"She's like someone took everything I wish I had figured out by now and just put it in a 9-year-old," he said. "She asks questions I don't have answers to and accepts my answers anyway. She's kind without being naive. She's funny without being cruel. She's He stopped, shook his head slightly.
She's the best thing I ever did." Claire watched him as he talked, the way people watch something that reminds them of a feeling they thought they'd lost access to. "She sounds incredible," she said, and she meant it. "She is." He paused.
"She's also the reason I'm sitting here instead of in a corner office somewhere. But that's a longer story." "I have time," Claire said. And just like that, without ceremony, without either of them deciding to do it, the real conversation began. Marcus told her about the job he'd lost.