That's the test. He said they talked for an hour and 40 minutes. She knew because she checked the time when she said good nights. And it was 11:43 and she picked up the phone at 10:02 and the time had moved the way it moves when you're not watching it. They talked about his grandmother, about the initiative she was reviving, about a book he was reading and one she should read that he described with the specific enthusiasm of someone who found something they wanted to share.
They talked about Ava's theory that Tyler was acting out because of instability at home, which was, Marcus said, both probably correct and also the most sophisticated behavioral analysis ever produced by a third grader with a stapler. When she said good night, he said, "Call me Thursday. I have a board call Wednesday and a performance review Thursday," she said. After the performance review, he said, "Okay. " She said, "Good night, Victoria. Good night, Marcus. " She put the phone down and sat in the dark for a while.
She thought, "This is what wanting something feels like. When it's real. When it's yours, when it doesn't come with a return on investment. " She went to bed still thinking it. Wednesday's board call was the first one in recent memory where she felt the full weight of what she'd built and was not exhausted by it. She presented the arbitration update with precision and patience.
She walked them through the revised acquisition framework and then at the end when any other Wednesday she would have gone straight to action items. She reopened the workers initiative. She didn't call it phase three. She called it the Carter Initiative and then caught herself and changed it in real time to the Georgia program and said they were funding it at 8 million over 3 years starting in January and that it was not optional and it was not a PR play and she would personally be reviewing the implementation quarterly. There was a pause on the call.
Gerald Watkins, who had been on her board since year two and had the energy of a man who had survived 17 corporate restructures and trusted nothing that didn't have a spreadsheet attached to it, said Victoria. This wasn't on the packet. No, she said it wasn't. The timing is exactly right. She said, I'll have the full framework to the board by Friday.
If anyone has objections, I'd like them in writing by end of day Thursday so I can address them before the vote. A beat. I've been waiting 14 months to do this properly. I'd prefer not to wait 15. Another pause.
Then Diane Louu, her longest serving board member and the one person in the room who had been with her since the second year when everything almost fell apart, said, "Send us the framework, Victoria. Well look at it. " "Thank you," Victoria said. She ended the call and sat back and thought about a man who said, "There's something satisfying about a thing coming in broken and you fixing it and getting to see the result. " She understood that more clearly now than she had on Saturday morning. She called Marcus Thursday night at 8:12, right after the performance review that had run 45 minutes over because her VP of operations had decided this was the meeting to have the conversation they'd been avoiding for 6 months, which turned out to be the right call by both of them. "How was the performance review? " Marcus asked.
"Productive," she said. "In the way that difficult things are productive when you actually have them. That's a good sign. He told me I'm hard to read and harder to please and that he's learned more in two years working for me than in the previous 10 years combined. She paused.
Then he asked for a raise. Did you give it to him? I gave him a bigger one than he asked for, she said. He nearly fell out of his chair. Good, Marcus said.