11:00, I'll be there. " He pressed the button for the elevator. When the doors opened, he stepped in, turned around, and looked at her one last time. Victoria Hayes was standing in the center of her perfect expensive empty apartment with her arms at her sides and her face stripped of every professional layer she owned. And she looked for the first time since he had known her like a person who wasn't entirely sure what happened next. Victoria, he said it was the first time he'd used her first name.
She registered it. He saw her register it. Get some sleep, he said. Tomorrow's going to be complicated. The elevator doors closed.
He rode down 40 floors and walked through the lobby and got into his car and drove home through the night city and he did not let himself think too hard about what he just agreed to. Because if he thought about it too hard, the scale of it would become impossible. Instead, he thought about the Saturday Farmers Market and Amara's complete inability to interact with a new person without immediately asking them 12 questions and the particular look on people's faces when they discovered that a 7-year-old was genuinely interrogating them about their life choices. He thought, "If Victoria Hayes can survive a Margaret Coleman at 11:00 on a Saturday morning, she can survive anything. " And somewhere under that thought, quieter, less examined, he thought that he wanted her to pass. He noticed that he wanted that.
And he let it sit there unnamed and unresolved because some truths are only ready to be looked at directly when you've had a little more time. He got home at 9:47. His mother was asleep on the couch with her Sudoku book open on her chest. Amara was asleep in her room, the nightlight making a soft gold circle on the ceiling. He stood in her doorway for a moment and listened to her breathe.
You're going to ask me so many questions on Saturday. He whispered, "And I genuinely cannot wait. " He went to bed. He did not sleep well. At 2:14 in the morning, his phone buzzed with a message from a number that wasn't saved in his contacts, but that he recognized immediately from the exchange earlier. The lawyers found something.
There's more to the Voss situation than I told you tonight. We need to talk before I send the contract. I'm sorry. I should have told you everything at once. Darius stared at the ceiling.
He typed back. How much more? The response came in 30 seconds. Four words. Enough to change everything.
He put the phone down. He looked at the dark ceiling of his apartment. He thought about a woman 40 floors up in a glass tower. Still awake, still fighting, carrying something heavier than she'd shown him. He thought about what it cost to ask for help when you'd spent your entire life proving you didn't need it.
He thought about the note she'd slid across the table at lunch. The handwriting that was precise and controlled and the single fact that she had written the note at all that in the middle of a crowded cafeteria in front of colleagues and cameras and the entire observable professional world, Victoria Hayes had made a choice to trust him. He picked up the phone. He typed. Tell me in the morning.