She thought about a man who had known exactly who she was since 11:00 last night, had spent the entire day saying nothing and had written those three words but on the back of a business card without knowing whether she'd ever find them. She thought he wasn't waiting for her to prove something. He was waiting for her to be ready. She turned the card over once, then back. She picked up her phone.
She typed a text to the number he'd written. She typed, "I found what you wrote. " She looked at it for a moment. She sent it. She put the phone down and brushed her teeth and changed into the sleep shirt she'd packed and lay down in the dark. And at 11:47, her phone lit up once on the nightstand.
She reached over and looked at it. He'd sent one word back. It said, "Good. " She put the phone down. She turned off the light. She slept like something that had been holding its breath for a very long time had finally remembered how to breathe.
She left Milhaven at 9:17 on Sunday morning. She'd gone back downstairs for coffee and found Susan Greer already at the kitchen counter and Susan had handed her a paper bag without being asked. Inside was a container of the leftover pecan waffle batter and a handwritten note that said cast iron pan, medium heat, 4 minutes each side. Don't rush them. Victoria had stood there holding that bag and felt something in her throat that she did not allow to become anything further.
You'll come back, Susan said. It wasn't a question. I think I will, Victoria said. Good, Susan said. Same word she'd used before.
Same uncomplicated meaning. She drove out of Mil Haven with the windows down and the paper bag on the passenger seat and Marcus's business card in the console where she could see it. And she did not look at her phone for the first 40 minutes of the drive, which was its own kind of achievement. When she finally did look, there were 53 notifications. She put it back down.
She thought instead about what he'd said. 5 hours of highway between two people and no fake breakdown to start from. She turned that over in her mind. The way you turn a stone that you've picked up because it caught the light. Trying to understand exactly what made it catch.
The thing that had happened in Mil Haven was real. She was certain of that. She'd spent enough years reading rooms and calibrating people to know when something was performance and when it wasn't. Marcus Carter was not performing anything. Ava Carter was constitutionally incapable of performing anything.
What she'd experienced in that house with the blue door was the most honest 60 hours she'd had in longer than she could name. The question was what you did with 60 honest hours when you had to go back to your actual life. She drove. She crossed the county line. She passed through two towns she'd never heard of and would probably never see again.
She stopped for gas outside of Mon and stood at the pump in the October air and called her chief of staff. He answered on the first ring. Tell me everything's under control, she said. Everything's under control, he said. The arbitration team sent a revised proposal Friday afternoon.
Kendall's office called twice. I told them you were unavailable. The board packet for Wednesday is ready for your review whenever you are. A pause. How are you?
I'm good, she said. He was quiet for a second. In 7 years of working together, Daniel had learned to parse her the way forensic accountants parts, balance sheets, not just what was there, but what the discrepancy between expected and actual suggested. You sound different, he said. I'll be in the office at 8 tomorrow, she said.
Hold my 11:00. We need to talk about the workers initiative I mentioned last quarter. You want to revive that? I want to do it properly this time, she said. Not as a PR line actually do it, she hung up the pump nozzle.
I'll explain Monday. She got back in the car. She drove the last three hours thinking about the workers initiative, a program she'd sketched out for 14 months ago and shelved because the timing was wrong and the board was nervous and she hadn't fought for it the way she should have. A program that would fund trade apprenticeships, automotive and electrical and construction in underserved communities across Georgia. She'd called it phase three of their community investment strategy, which was the problem.
She'd given it a corporate name and put it in a deck and let it die in committee. She thought about Marcus Carter fixing cars in a shop with his daughter's drawing on the dashboard because his father had taught him and his father's father before that and the knowledge lived in his hands now and it was worth something real to real people every single day. She thought about how she'd called it phase 3. She should have called it what it was. She got back to Atlanta at 2:14 in the afternoon.
She rode the elevator to the 32nd floor. She unlocked the apartment. She walked in and set her bag down and stood in the silence. The view was what it always was. Atlanta spread out in every direction.
Brilliant and enormous and entirely indifferent. She stood at the window for a minute. Then she opened the paper from Susan and found the cast iron pan in the back of the cabinet where she'd put it after buying it with good intentions three years ago and using it once. She made the waffles. She ate them standing at the counter.
She thought about a kitchen table with three chairs. She thought, "That's the table I want. " She wrote it down on actual paper in the notebook she used for her most important thinking, the one she'd bought at the beginning of the year with the intention of using it for strategic planning, which had instead remained 90% blank because she did all her strategic thinking in meetings and had started to understand that meetings were where honest thinking went to get managed into something presentable. She wrote, "That's the table I want. " She went to bed at 10:00. She slept. She called Marcus on Tuesday night.
She'd thought about calling Monday. She'd thought about it Sunday. She'd told herself she was giving it space. Giving him space. Giving whatever this was the chance to settle before she poked at it.