Good. You sleeping some Amara. She's decided her lab partner is funny. High praise. Lauren laughed.
Genuine easy. The kind that came from knowing someone well enough to understand exactly why that sentence was funny. I miss this, she said. She said it plainly without decoration or apology. Just the true thing.
He held her gaze. Yeah, he said. Me too. They drove to a diner after. Not Patty's a different one.
A little closer, a little brighter, with better coffee and worse pie. But the same quality of conversation, the kind that picked up without needing to start over, that moved between the serious and the ordinary. The way conversation does between two people who have stopped performing for each other. She told him about her father. Richard had transferred the investment capital in October, the minority stake, no board seat, exactly as agreed.
But then something unexpected happened. Richard had started showing up. Not to the program, not to Lauren's space. He'd called her three times in November with questions. Real questions, the kind he asked his VPs about the coalition partnership and the curriculum development costs and whether she'd thought about the liability structure for the participant businesses during the training period.
He's not managing it, Lauren said still with a trace of wonder in her voice. He's asking. There's a difference. There is, Daniel said. My aunt told me he's been talking about my mother more lately, telling stories about her at family dinners.
He hadn't done that in years. She paused. I think something shifted when I sat across from him in that study. I think he'd been managing me because he didn't know how to keep her. She looked at her coffee, but that's his work, not mine.
No, Daniel said. It's his. I just wanted you to know he's trying in the way he knows how to try, which is still very much his way. But it's something, Daniel nodded. He thought about the phone call in October after the resignation.
Richard's voice saying, "I was wrong about the second part. He thought about how hard it was for men like Richard, men who'd built things from nothing through the sheer force of their certainty to say that, how much it cost them, how much it meant when they paid it. He's a good man. " Daniel said. He lost his way for a while. We all do, Lauren said.
She looked at Daniel. You did? Yeah, I did. Yeah. And then we find it again, she said.