How? She asked it like she genuinely didn't know. Like it was a math problem she couldn't solve. How do you carry all of that and still show up every day and do what you do? Marcus thought about it.
Genuinely thought about it because he wasn't the kind of man who gave reflexive answers to real questions. I stopped waiting for it to get easier, he said finally. And I started just doing the next thing, whatever the next thing was. Feed her. Get to work.
Do the job right. Come home. Do it again. He paused. It's not glamorous, but it adds up.
She looked at him like he'd said something in a language she recognized but hadn't spoken in years. The next thing she repeated. The next thing. For a while, neither of them spoke. Outside the city was waking up in full horns.
Distant offices. A delivery truck somewhere on the street below. But in here, the quiet held that expensive hush of a space where the world was something that happened at a manageable distance. I should go, Marcus said. I know.
He stood, picked up his jacket from the back of the door, shrugged it on, felt himself sliding back into the shape of Marcus Carter, senior operations manager, level seven. The man who arrived on time and kept his head down and knew where his shoes were. At the door, he stopped. He didn't turn all the way around, just half. For what it's worth, he said the Henderson roll out wasn't a leadership failure.
The numbers were manipulated downstream. Someone changed the projected cost figures in the final report before it went to your desk. The room went absolutely still. What? Her voice was quiet.
The kind of quiet that has weight. I noticed it when I was pulling our operational logs for the quarter review. The variance between what we submitted and what ended up in the board presentation was too clean to be a rounding error. I flagged it to my supervisor. I don't know what happened after that.
He looked at the floor for a second. I probably should have gone further up. When he looked at her again, Amelia's face had changed. The CEO was back, but it wasn't the version he'd seen in board meetings and Forbes covers and glasswalled executive suites. It was something older, harder.