Lily, who had been coloring on the paper placemat with the crayons the diner provided, looked up without warning and said, "Daddy keeps the compass because it helps him remember which way is home. Maybe you need one, too. Marcus and Viv looked at each other across the table over the head of a seven-year-old who had no idea she'd just said something profound. She does this, Marcus said quietly. It's the surplus charm.
Lily said without looking up from her drawing. The story broke on Tuesday. Viv had known it would. You don't ask a company employee on a date in front of 30 witnesses without it becoming a story. She'd factored that into the decision, or she thought she had.
The actual experience of it was different from the theoretical expectation. The item in Nashville Social Pulse, a gossip blog that served the city's business community with the breathless energy of a tabloid, ran the headline, "Callaway CEO goes off script, power move, or unraveling." The article was careful to remain technically within the lines of legitimate commentary while implying that Viv's interest in a facilities worker was either a cry for help or a calculated PR move to humanize a CEO with a reputation for being unreachable. The comments were worse. They always were.
But the part that required Viv's full attention was the name in paragraph 4. Reev Callaway had apparently agreed to a brief comment. I wish Viven the best. The quote read, "She's always been passionate. I hope she has the support around her she needs during this.
He'd been on the board for 6 months. A late addition she hadn't fully blocked because he'd come in through a shareholder resolution, and she'd calculated that fighting it publicly would cost more than managing him quietly." She'd been wrong. Quiet hadn't meant harmless. It had meant patient.
Marcus saw the article before she could reach him. She drove to East Nashville after work, take out bags in the passenger seat. The specific kind of dread sitting in her stomach that came from knowing a conversation was going to be hard and having no way to skip it. He answered the door looking like someone who'd been sitting with something difficult for several hours. Come in, he said.
Lily was in her room, door closed. Marcus gestured to the couch and sat across from her elbows on his knees. The article's wrong about a lot of things, Viv said. I know. He picked up the compass from the coffee table, turned it over.
That's not entirely what I'm sitting with. She waited. Lily's class two parents came up to her teacher today, he said, asking questions. One of them told the teacher that it was concerning that the Callaway CEO was involved with a schoolage child's father. And the way she said involved had air quotes around it that Lily's teacher had to hear.
He looked up. She's seven. She doesn't understand why her dad is suddenly interesting to people she doesn't know. Viv felt the weight of that settle into her chest. I can't have her be collateral.
Marcus said, "I need you to understand that's not negotiable. Not because I don't." He stopped. "Not because what's happening between us isn't real to me. It is.