Gerald looked at him for a moment. Yeah, he said. That's the job. The meeting lasted 45 minutes. When Marcus walked out, he had a starting date 2 weeks out, a title, and a number that was more than he'd been making before the company folded.
He sat in his car in the parking lot for a full minute before he trusted himself to drive. Then he called Olivia. She picked up on the second ring. "How'd it go? " she said. "I got it," Marcus said.
Silence on the other end. Then she said, "Marcus. " "Yeah, tell me the number. " He told her. She made a sound that was not quite a word. And then she said, "Go tell your daughters. I'm going," he said.
"Go," she said. Now he was smiling so hard it was difficult to drive. He was almost home when it hit him. Not the job, not the number, something else, something that had been building for weeks under everything else. Quiet insistent, refusing to be talked out of itself.
He pulled up in front of his house and sat there. He thought about Olivia saying, "I noticed things like it was something she decided to stop apologizing for. " He thought about her hand on the table near his close but not touching. He thought about Nadia at the front door saying, "I like her. " The way kids say the true thing before they learn to edit it. He thought about Robert on the porch. If you have even a grain of common sense left in you, you'll say yes.
He got out of the car. He did not go inside his house. He crossed the street. He knocked on Robert's door. Robert answered it and looked at him and looked at his face and said, "You got it. " "I got it," Marcus said.
Robert put out his hand. Marcus shook it hard. "Good man," Robert said. "Just those two words. I need to tell you something else," Marcus said.
Robert stepped back and let him in. They stood in the front hallway, not the kitchen. "Not the porch, just the hallway, because this wasn't going to take long," Olivia Marcus said. Robert waited. I'm not trying to make this complicated.
Marcus said, "I'm not making any assumptions. I'm just He stopped. Started again. I need you to know that she's not a situation to me. She's not a complication or something I'm trying to figure out strategically.
She's He looked at the old man straight. She's real to me. " And I thought, "You should hear that from me directly. " Robert Hayes stood in his own hallway and looked at Marcus Williams for a long time. His expression was not readable. That was the discipline of a man who had survived decades of things that required him not to show what he felt until he decided what he felt. Then he said, "She's going to push back.