He had never looked at it from her bedroom. He was on his feet before he made a conscious decision to stand. Shoes already in his hand, found them, thank God, beside the chair, and he was running through options with the speed of a man who has made hard decisions under pressure before. Because Marcus Carter had, in fact, made hard decisions under pressure before. He'd raised a daughter alone.
He'd buried his mother while managing a department restructure. He'd sat across from lawyers during a divorce that took 2 years and cost him almost everything he'd saved. He knew how to think when the ground moved. "Okay," he told himself. "Okay, you're in Amelia Whitmore's home.
You're in her. You're in her bedroom. You slept in her bedroom. You are a 35-year-old black man with a daughter and a mortgage adjacent rent payment and a performance review coming up in 6 weeks. And you are standing in your CEO's bedroom holding your shoes like an idiot.
Think he remembered the party. He remembered the open bar and the speeches and the way the company's 15th anniversary had transformed the rooftop of the Alderman Hotel into something that looked like it belonged in a magazine. He remembered talking to Denise from legal about her retirement plans. He remembered the shrimp cocktail which had been excellent. He remembered Amelia.
He remembered that she had come to stand near the window away from the cluster of executives who usually orbited her at company events and he had made the mistake or what he'd thought at the time was a mistake of standing near her not to talk to her just because the window had a view of the river and Marcus liked rivers and he hadn't expected her to turn and say without preamble or any of her usual executive measured cadence, "You think the Henderson roll out was our fault, don't He'd looked at her. She'd been watching him with those CEO eyes, the ones that didn't miss anything. And she'd had a glass of white wine in her hand. And she'd looked for just a second like a woman who was genuinely asking and not setting a trap. So he'd told the truth.
I think the Henderson roll out failed because three people in this building saw the warning nines saw 8 weeks out and nobody wanted to be the one to bring it upstairs. He'd expected Frost. He'd gotten interest. Which three people? She'd said, "My team plus Jerry Okafor from Product Strategy.
He sent two emails. I know because I sent a reply and CCD you something had shifted in her face. Not anger, something closer to recognition. I get 140 emails a day." Mr. Carter, I know that's also a problem.
She'd laughed. Not the laugh he'd seen her use at board presentations. The brief controlled. I acknowledged that was clever sound that she deployed like a tool a real laugh surprised out of her and then she looked almost annoyed at herself for it which had made Marcus against his better judgment smile after that. The evening had gotten complicated in the way evenings get complicated when two people who have been carefully professional with each other for 3 years suddenly find themselves off the clock and three drinks in.
He remembered more conversation. He remembered the crowd thinning. He remembered feeling the specific heaviness in his limbs that told him he'd hit his limit, not drunk, just done the way a man gets done when he's been running on 5 hours of sleep a night for longer than he wants to count. He remembered not wanting to call a ride share because he'd had enough and the wait time was 45 minutes and the idea of standing on a curb in the cold was he didn't remember getting to this room. That was the part that scared him most.