She stood up, picked up her jacket. I'm done letting eventually be a reason to do nothing now. He watched her leave. He sat there for another four minutes with a half empty coffee cup and the particular feeling of a man who knows the map of his life just shifted and isn't sure yet in which direction. Then he went back to work.
For the next 3 weeks, they found a rhythm that had no official name and no acknowledged shape. Coffee on Tuesdays, usually a walk on Thursday afternoons near a park that split the distance between the fleetyard and the Whitmore building where Lauren kept her office. Phone calls some evenings when Amara was asleep and Lauren had gotten through another dinner where her father had invited someone she hadn't asked to meet. They talked about her notebook, about the program. Daniel walked her through the operational side of things she'd been working on.
Theoretically, the actual cost structures of small delivery operations, the inventory management pitfalls, the things a catering company or a boutique wholesaler needed to know before their third year when the cash flow traps hit. She listened. She asked good questions. She pushed back when his numbers didn't match her research. And she was usually right.
And he told her so. They talked about Amara, about what it meant to raise a child alone and well, about the particular fear of a parent who knows that no matter how much you try to protect them from the world, the world will eventually get in anyway, and all you can do is make sure they're strong enough to meet it. Lauren listened to that the way she listened to everything completely, not waiting for her turn to talk. Actually in it. They talked about small things, music, the parts of Charlotte nobody photographed, but everybody who actually lived there knew.
Food, books, the particular specific loneliness of being surrounded by people and not quite connecting with any of them. And they did not talk about what this was because the moment they talked about it, the shape of it would have to be something. And right now, without a shape, it was the best thing in both of their weeks. Daniel knew this couldn't hold. He'd known it from the second coffee.
A man in his position seeing the owner's daughter twice a week talking on the phone, walking through parks. This was the kind of thing that looked like one thing to everyone watching and something else to the two people in the middle of it. And the two people in the middle of it were not in a position to explain the difference. He told himself that every Thursday on the walk back to the yard, he told himself that every time he set his phone down after her call, he was still telling himself that on a Wednesday evening when his phone rang and it wasn't Lauren, it was his brother Marcus calling from Atlanta. "You good? " Marcus said, which was the way Marcus started every call because Marcus believed in cutting straight to what mattered.
"I'm good," Daniel said. "You sound different. " Different. How? Lighter. A pause.
You meet somebody. No. Danny, I'm serious. Marcus, it's not like that. Then what's it like?
Daniel looked at the ceiling of his apartment. Amara was asleep. The dishes were done. The week was organized. The Daniel Brooks of 3 years ago would have been perfectly comfortable in this exact moment.
He wasn't comfortable. It's complicated, he said. It's always complicated. What's her name? I'm not doing this.