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.