She'd just shown up and brought herself and let that be what it was. Maybe that was it. Maybe that was the whole thing. She was still thinking about it when Marcus found her in the hallway 20 minutes later putting on her coat because it was nearly 9 and the drive was 5 hours. You don't have to leave tonight.
He said I have a 7:30 tomorrow. She said you could call in from here. He said it was the first time he'd said anything like that. The first time he'd suggested the 5 hours of highway could be managed differently. She went still.
He looked at her carefully. I'm not saying, he paused. I'm saying you don't have to drive 5 hours at 9:00 at night every time. Marcus, there's a room, he said. There's always been a room.
I just wasn't saying it. She looked at him in the hallway of his sister's house with the sounds of his family behind them and said, "Why are you saying it now? " He thought about it honestly, which was the only way he did anything because Ava told Celeste she was pretty sure you were going to be around for a long time. He said and Celeste told me and I thought about it and I think Ava's right. He looked at his own hands for a moment. She usually is.
Victoria said nothing. I'm not asking you to rearrange your life, he said. I'm asking you to stop pretending the drive is manageable so you can give yourself an excuse to keep your distance. The accuracy of it was bracing. She felt it land and she didn't flinch.
I haven't been keeping distance, she said. You've been visiting, he said gently. Exactly. There's a difference between visiting somewhere and deciding you're willing to belong there. She looked at him.
He looked back at her. Are you asking me to belong here? She said, "I'm asking you," he said, "to stop acting like the question scares you. " The question did scare her. She'd spent 20 years making herself unscarable. And here was a man in a hallway in Mil Haven.
Georgia asking her a question about belonging, and her hands were not entirely steady. "It does scare me," she said. "I know," he said. "Say it anyway," she breathed in. "I want to belong here," she said.
"I want to stop visiting and start. " She stopped. "Found it. I want this to be the place I'm going toward. Not the place I drive away from every Sunday. " Marcus was very still. "Then stay tonight," he said.
"Start there. " She stayed. She called in from his kitchen at 7:30 the next morning with her laptop open and her coffee in the mug she was starting to think of. As hers, the blue one, second from the left, and Marcus dropped Ava at school on his way to open the shop. And for two hours, Victoria Hail ran a billion-dollar technology company from a kitchen table in Mil Haven, Georgia. And it worked exactly as well as it worked from the 32nd floor.
Better actually, she told Daniel that when he said, surprised that her connection was unusually clear. Where are you? He said, Georgia, she said. Mil Haven. Yes.
A pause that contained considerable information. Then the board packet for December needs your sign off by Thursday. You'll have it Wednesday, she said. Okay, he said. And then because Daniel had worked for her for 7 years and understood her in the particular way that longevity and proximity produce.
You sound good, Victoria. I am good, she said. She meant it with the full and specific weight of what good actually meant. Not performing fine, not managing adequate, not keeping pace with a life that was moving faster than she could feel it. Actually good in the basic physical whole body sense of the word.
She left Mil Haven at noon with a meeting in Atlanta at 3 that she could not reschedu. Marcus walked her to the car. It was raining lightly. The soft November rain that didn't commit to anything. Just reminded you it existed.
I'll come back Friday, she said. I know. He said. She looked at him. You know, you said you want to belong here.
He said people who belong somewhere come back. She got in the car. She drove. The decision she'd been doing math on since that Sunday in October. The decision about rearranging about where to put the important things crystallized somewhere around mile 241 on the drive back to Atlanta.
Not as a sudden revelation, more as an acknowledgement of something that had already been decided and was only waiting for her to say it clearly. She called Daniel from the car. I need to talk to you Thursday, she said. About the office structure, the Atlanta office structure. I'm thinking about opening a satellite office, she said.
Central Georgia small operational pilot for 6 months. Evaluate from there. A pause. Can I ask what's driving this? We have 4,000 employees across Georgia.
She said, "If we're going to run the trades program authentically, we need to be present in the communities we're serving, not just financially present," she merged onto the interstate. And I think I do some of my best thinking closer to the ground. Another pause. The board is going to want to know the business case. The business case is that proximity to what you're building changes how you build it.
She said, "I'll write it up. It'll be the most honest document I've produced since the trades program framework. " She heard something in Daniel's silence that might have been a smile. Thursday, he said. Thursday, she said. She got back to Atlanta at 4:40.
She made the 3:00 meeting by phone from the car. She went to the office and signed the board packet and reviewed two contracts and called her COO about a hiring decision. And by 8P, she had done everything that needed doing. She went home. She stood at the window.
Atlanta was what it always was, brilliant and enormous and alive. She had built something here. She had put 14 years into this city and it had given her back a company and a reputation and a life that looked from the outside like everything anyone could want. She thought about a faced Thanksgiving the satisfied certainty of a child who had decided on something and was not interested in being argued with. She thought about Celeste saying you're building something different.
She thought about Marcus in the hallway, asking her to stop acting like the questions scared her. She thought about three words on the back of a business card. Don't go yet, she picked up her phone, she called Marcus. He picked up on the second ring. I'm opening a satellite office in Mil Haven, she said without preamble.