She had started second grade that fall and was already campaigning to run the class science project by herself. Her teacher had emailed Marcus to say Lily was enthusiastic and occasionally loud about her opinions, which was probably the politest thing anyone had ever said about his daughter. And he'd read that email twice and smiled both times. Cheryl had been gone for 3 years. A cardiac event.
Sudden, random, the kind of thing that happens to other families until it happens to yours. She was 30 years old. She was laughing at something on TV when it happened. Marcus had called 911 and held her hand and told her she was going to be fine. And she had smiled at him in a way that told him she didn't entirely believe that.
And then she was gone. He kept her compass on his keychain. She'd bought it at a flea market their first summer together, pressed it into his palm and said, "So you always know which way is home." He thought it was corny at the time. He thought about that a lot now.
The job at Callaway Tower paid 62,000 a year. Enough for rent in East Nashville. Enough for Lily's after school program. Enough for the occasional Friday night treat of milkshakes at Riverside Diner, where Lily would spend 20 minutes choosing between chocolate and strawberry before ordering chocolate every single time. It wasn't wealthy.
It was enough. And Marcus had learned the hard way that enough held with gratitude was worth more than plenty held with clenched hands. The building's residents didn't see him much. He was most visible when something broke. The rest of the time he existed in the walls and ceilings and mechanical rooms of their professional lives, keeping things running with a quiet competence that required no recognition to be real.
Viven Callaway had a reputation. Inside Callaway Tower, the most commonly used adjective whispered, never said directly to her face was precise, which was the polite version, the version that got used in performance reviews and industry profiles. The less polite version, the one that circulated in the breakroom and got texted between assistants with the volume turned down, was Ice, the ICE queen of the Nashville Hospitality Corridor. She had been CEO of Callaway Group for two and won two years, appointed after her father's health declined, and a board vote that she'd earned rather than inherited. A distinction she'd made clear in her first all hands mighting by restructuring three underperforming divisions before the 90-day mark.
She was 31 years old and she ran a company with 400 employees and 200 million in annual revenue and she was by every professional metric extraordinarily good at it. She was also deeply structurally comprehensively alone. The divorce had finalized four years ago. Reeve Callaway. Yes, she'd kept the name.
It was hers by the time he left had been charming and political and supportive of her career right up until her career outpaced his. At which point his support had turned into something that looked like support from the outside but felt from the inside like a slow erosion. By the time she found out, he'd been quietly working with two board members to position himself for a CEO seat above her. They'd been married 3 years, and she'd spent most of them alone in conference rooms while he attended the parties. The settlement was 4.2 million in her favor.