Then she said, "You've done this before. It wasn't exactly a question. " "Different context," he said. "What context? " He was quiet for a moment. The storm moved through the building. The monitors flickered somewhere below them in the stairwell or the corridors.
Something someone was still moving. I worked emergency services for 9 years. He said before this structural emergencies, industrial accidents, the kind of situations where you go in when other bold are trying to get out. He paused. I left because he stopped.
Chose different words. I left 4 years ago, took the maintenance work because the hours were predictable and I needed predictable because of your daughter, she said. He looked at her. Gerald mentioned it. She said, "When I was in the lobby earlier tonight before everything went down, he said the midnight shift tech was a single dad great at his job. " She paused.
He didn't say your name, but I was going to ask. Darius looked at the security monitors for a moment. Her name's Maya, he said. She's 12. Victoria was quiet.
She's why I do the work I do, he said. She's why I pick up the midnight calls. She's why I do everything. He looked back at Victoria. Everything except leave her when it counts.
Something moved across Victoria's face. Not the CEO expression. Something older and more honest than that. I don't have anyone like that, she said. And she said it simply without self-pity.
Just as a fact that sat in the air between them. "No," he said. He didn't fill the space with reassurance she hadn't asked for. She nodded slightly like she appreciated that. They sat in the quiet of the security office, waiting for the sound of sirens, and around them the building groaned in the storm, and somewhere in the floors below them, someone moved through the dark with a purpose neither of them could yet fully name.
Darius put his back against the wall beside the door, his feet flat on the floor, his hands loose in his lap. He had been in bad rooms before. He had waited in bad rooms before. He knew how to be still without being passive, how to be ready, without burning through the readiness before it was needed. He watched Victoria Hayes sit across from him with her hands in her lap and her heels on the desk beside her and her eyes on the door.
She was afraid. He could see that now clearly without the CEO layer between him and her. She was afraid and she was furious. And she was holding both of those things with a discipline that he recognized because he used the same discipline himself. Whoever it is, she said quietly without looking away from the door.