Amara looked up from the kitchen table where she was doing math. She looked at Lauren. She looked at Daniel. She looked back at Lauren. You're the complicated one, she said.
Lauren blinked. Excuse me. He said you were complicated. I said that probably meant you matched. She looked at her math book.
I was right. Lauren looked at Daniel. He spread his hands. What can I tell you? I brought pastries, Lauren said.
From Charlotte. Amra's expression shifted from evaluating to interested. What kind? Almond croissants and something the woman at the counter called a queen Aman. I don't know how to say it.
She wrote it down. Amara pushed her math book aside. I'll try the one you can't say first. Daniel stood in his kitchen watching his daughter and this woman sit at his table and work through a box of pastries and the math problem. Amara hadn't been able to finish Lauren reading it over her shoulder and saying the answer was actually simpler than it looked.
If you thought about it as a ratio instead of a fraction, which was how Lauren thought about everything, Daniel realized and also how Amara thought about everything. And the two of them were going to either be very good for each other or absolutely insufferable together and possibly both. After Amara finished the math and most of the Kawi Janna man and decided Lauren was acceptable, she took her book to her room with the particular pointed tact of a 9-year-old who understood that adults sometimes needed to be alone without being told directly. Lauren watched her go. Then she looked at Daniel.
"She's wonderful," she said, not as a performance, as an observation. "I know," he said. "She's going to be extraordinary. " "I know that, too. " He sat down across from her. She opened the new notebook. Clean pages, a few things written at the front.
I have eight inquiries for the second cohort, she said. Eight businesses and I've only been accepting applications for 3 weeks. The coalition wants to talk about expanding to a second city. She looked up. Durham.
He looked at her. That's where your father started. That's where my mother kept his books, she said. In a little apartment with bad heat and three trucks in the lot. She held his gaze.
I want the second cohort to be in Durham, the city where it all started for my family, but this time built by me on my terms. He felt the weight of that, the specific courage of it. How does Richard feel about Durham? He said, "He cried," she said simply when I told him. He cried and then he pretended he hadn't.