Not wrong. Just unfamiliar. I was in the area. Your office is 12 mi away, Marcus said. A pause.
I was in the general area, Olivia. I brought lunch, she said, extending the bag toward him with the directness of someone who had decided to commit to a thing rather than apologize for it. For you and your crew. I She paused. I wanted to.
Marcus looked at her. He thought about 12 miles. He thought about a CEO who managed entire boardrooms pulling up in a dark blue car with a restaurant bag because the east wall of her father's property had taken on water overnight, and one man's crew would be working through lunch. He thought about how people reveal themselves not in the manage moments, but in the ones they don't plan. Thank you, he said.
Don't make it a thing," she said. But there was something in her face that was waiting just slightly to see what he'd do with it. He turned and called out, "Dawn, Tommy, come eat." He didn't make it a thing. She stayed longer than she'd planned to. He knew this because 30 minutes in, she glanced at her watch with the expression of someone who two who had a 2:00 they were rearranging in their head.
And then she put her wrist back down without leaving. They sat on the tailgate of his truck, all four of them, for a while until Deshawn and Tommy drifted back to work with a particular graceful tact of people who can read a situation. And Marcus suspected he would owe Don a deeply significant thank you at some point. Then it was just Marcus and Olivia on the tailgate in the afternoon with the ordinary sounds of the work continuing around them. "How'd the Whitmore call go?" Marcus asked.
He wants to meet before the board meeting. One-on-one. That's good. I know. A pause.
I'm going to tell him about James. She said it quietly. Definitively, like a decision that had already been made but was being said out loud for the first time to make it real. He'll respect it, Marcus said. Or he'll think I'm weak.
If he thinks honesty about a mistake is weakness, he's not the ally you thought he was, and you find that out now instead of after. He looked at her. But I don't think that's what he'll think. She was quiet then. How do you always know what's actually true?
I don't, Marcus said. I just don't let myself pretend I don't know when I do. A pause. Most of the time, the truth isn't hiding. It's just that saying it out loud costs something.
So, we act like we don't know it yet. Olivia looked at him with that expression again, the calibrating one, but softer now. The precision turned not toward data, but towards something she was trying to understand. Marcus, she said, and then stopped. H, what do you want?
She said, not for your daughter, not for the company, for yourself. What do you actually want? He was quiet for a moment. A real quiet, not a deflective one. I want someone to look at everything I've built, he said slowly.