"He's not wrong." Marcus nodded not triumphantly. "Just acknowledging." "What do you do?" Olivia asked. "When you know what's wrong, but you don't know if you have what it takes to fix it, right?" Marcus looked at her steadily. "You get up at 4:47 in the morning," he said. You make the eggs with real butter even when money's tight.
You tell your crew the honest numbers and you ask them to trust you anyway. And you do the next right thing and then the one after that and you don't let yourself imagine all the ways it can fall apart until it actually does. He paused because it might not. Most of the time if the foundation is real, it holds. Olivia looked at him.
The armor wasn't back up. She looked like she was 39 seconds from saying something real, something she hadn't said to anyone in a long time. And then her phone rang. She looked at it and Marcus watched her face close back up, not harshly, just automatically the way a door closes because that's what doors do. And she said, "I have to take this." And stood up and was the CEO again.
She walked away down the path, already talking, voice confident and crisp and entirely in command. Marcus turned back to his work. He thought she almost said it. He thought, "She'll get there." He went back to building something meant to last. 3 Days passed before Marcus saw Olivia again.
In those 3 days, he did what he always did. When something unsettled him, he worked. He worked with the kind of focused intensity that left no room for anything else. The kind that Dawn recognized from experience and silently respected. And Tommy, who was still learning to read Marcus, mistook for anger.
He mad about something? Tommy asked Deshawn quietly on the second day. No, Deshawn said. He seems he's thinking. Desawn handed him a tool without looking up.
When Marcus gets quiet like that, it means something's moving around in his head that he hasn't named yet. Just work. What was moving around in Marcos's head was this. He had met a lot of people in his life who had built walls. He had met people who used money as a wall and success as a wall and sarcasm as a wall and distance as a wall.
He'd built a few himself. After Diane died, when Amara was two, and the world felt like it was made entirely of exposed edges, but Olivia Bennett's wall was something different. It wasn't defensive. It wasn't the wall of someone who'd been hurt and was protecting the wound. It was the wall of someone who had decided at some point, probably early, probably as a logical conclusion she'd reached and felt proud of that needing people was a structural flaw, like a loadbearing wall that had been removed, and the building had somehow stayed up, and she'd taken that as proof that the wall was unnecessary.
Marcus knew what happened to buildings where you removed the wrong wall and they appeared to stay up. He tried to stop thinking about it. He mostly failed. On Thursday afternoon, his phone rang and it was a number he didn't recognize. But the voice was immediately familiar, precise, controlled, and underneath both of those things, something that was working too hard.
Marcus, it's Olivia Bennett. My father gave me your number. I hope that's all right. It's fine, he said. He was up on a section of the upper framing.
One hand holding the phone, the other steadying himself. He climbed down. What do you need? A pause. Not long, but the kind of pause that meant she was deciding something.