Ava reappeared at Marcus' elbow with her rubber duck and the cake held with the careful authority of someone who understood what they were carrying. "Can Victoria come for dinner again? " she said. Marcus looked at Victoria. Victoria looked at Ava. I don't want to impose twice, she said.
You're not imposing. Ava said with great certainty. I'm inviting you. That's different. Marcus said, "She's right.
That is different. I have leftover chicken. " He said, "And I could make something with it. " He makes really good chicken soup. Ava said, "When it's the leftover chicken, it's not soup yet. " Marcus said, "It's a plan to make soup. " Same thing, Ava said. Again with that absolute economy of truth. Victoria thought about the Birchwood Inn.
She thought about room 6. She thought about 39 notifications and the board call on Wednesday and the life in Atlanta that was fully intact and fully waiting. Okay, she said dinner. Ava made a small fist pump that she thought no one saw. They both saw it.
The soup was extraordinary. She didn't know how it was possible for leftover chicken to become something like that in under an hour. But Marcus moved through his kitchen with a quiet efficiency that produced results that were impossible to be indifferent to. It was the kind of food that had history in it. Recipes that came from people who knew that feeding someone was a language all its own.
She sat at the table with Ava, who was telling her about the political dynamics of who had won the most at the ring toss and what that said about the structural advantages of longer arms. And she listened and added responses and ate the soup and thought. This is what the word home is supposed to mean. She didn't say that out loud, but she thought it. After dinner, after the dishes, after Ava disappeared to her room to read with the rubber duck positioned ceremonially on the nightstand, Marcus and Victoria sat in the living room with the quiet that she had come to understand.
Was his natural state generous and full and requiring nothing from her. I have to go back tomorrow, she said. I know, he said. I have a board call Wednesday and a performance review Thursday and an acquisition in arbitration that's been stalled and been stalled weeks. That sounds like a lot.
It's exactly what I signed up for, she said. I just didn't know what I was signing away when I signed up for it. Marcus turned his cup slowly in his hands. Not avoiding her, thinking, "Can I ask you something? " "Yes, when you go back," he said. "What are you going back to? " She thought about the answer honestly.
The company. She said the work it's I've built something. It matters. It employs 4,000 people. I know.