The voice from Friday morning, the one that had said good morning without armor. When I walked into that room Thursday and I saw you put those numbers on the screen when I saw what you had kept for two months, what you had protected, what you had refused to let disappear. I thought about what I said to you on the phone last week. That you wouldn't be standing there alone. I remember.
I meant it in a professional context when I said it. She said, I want to say it again now and mean it in every context. He stood in his kitchen with his coffee going cold and the morning coming in through the window and his daughter still asleep in the back of the apartment. And he held the phone and felt something he hadn't let himself feel in a very long time. The specific dangerous essential feeling of not being alone in the particular dark you've been standing in.
Okay, he said. Okay, he could hear faintly the almost smile. Okay, he said again. I hear you. I'm here.
A pause. Talk to the journalist. Tell him the truth. And then get some sleep today, Amelia, because Monday is going to be long and you're going to need to be yourself. Which version of myself?
He thought about every version he'd seen. The CEO in the glass office. The woman at the window in her apartment. The person who carried a company on her back and hadn't let anyone close enough to notice the weight. All of them, he said.
Every single one. She was quiet for a beat. Then, "Good morning, Marcus." He smiled. "Not because it was a call back to Friday, though it was because it was real." "Good morning," Amelia said. He hung up, refilled his cold coffee, and stood at the kitchen counter, and thought about what was coming.
The audit on Monday, the journalist deadline, Penn's unexplained lobby visit. Raymond in administrative leave. Scared and scared men in Marcus' experience never stayed still. They either went quiet or they moved in ways they hadn't calculated and he hadn't decided yet which was more dangerous. He thought about Caldwell's two non- votes in a room that had given Amelia 9.
He thought about the distance between 4 out of 11 and 9 out of 11 and what had crossed that distance and who had carried it. He thought about Lily, who would be awake in 20 minutes, asking about hamsters and breakfast, and whether it was a sneakers day or a boots day, whose whole world was contained and safe, and entirely dependent on a man who had spent the last week waiting through something that could have cost him everything she relied on. He had not flinched. He had not disappeared. He had done the next thing and the next thing after that and the next thing after that and now Monday was coming and he was ready.
He heard the small sound of Lily's door opening down the hall, her feet on the floor. The specific shuffling walk of a 7-year-old who is not fully awake but is moving toward her father because that is where the morning starts. He turned from the counter, put his coffee down, and opened his arms as she came around the corner, still half asleep, and walked directly into them. He held her. She didn't say anything.