For being a pause, for being what you are." He held the phone for a moment. He typed, "You too." And then he put his phone in his pocket and went back to the property and worked with his hands on something real, something that had been damaged and was now day by day, board by board, truth by truth, becoming something that would hold. The board meeting was on a Thursday. Marcus knew this the way he knew the weather, not because it affected his schedule directly, but because it was moving through his awareness constantly. A pressure in the background of every other thing he did that week.
Monday he worked. Tuesday he worked. Wednesday evening he sat at the kitchen table with Amara while she did homework and he reviewed the final documentation on the investment agreement with Richard. And he signed it and he took a photo of the signed page and texted it to Richard with no message attached. And Richard responded in 4 minutes with good.
Now stop worrying about it. Marcus texted back. I wasn't worrying. Richard texted Marcus. Marcus put the phone face down on the table.
Amara looked up from her homework. Who was that, Mr. Richard? Did he beat the Bishop Gambit yet? I don't think that's the current concern, Marcus said.
Amara considered this. He will, she said, with the confidence of someone who has coached extensively. I've been sending him practice scenarios. I know, he told me. He's a good student, she said.
He actually does the work instead of just saying he will. Marcus looked at his daughter. That's a surprisingly sophisticated observation. I pay attention, she said, and went back to her homework. He went back to the documents, but he was not entirely back to the documents.
Part of him was across the city in a 14th floor office, where a woman he cared about more than he had allowed himself to say, was spending her evening preparing for the most important professional moment of her career. And he had no way to be useful to that preparation except to have already said every true thing he could say, which he believed he had. He had to trust the foundation they'd built, which as it turned out was exactly what he'd been doing with this property for 8 weeks, building something solid enough to trust. He went to bed. He set the alarm for 4:47.
He slept better than he expected. Thursday morning arrived and Marcus was on site by 7 and the work was near enough to completion that the day had a different texture, the particular feeling of something being finished that has taken long enough that finishing it means something. He and Tommy worked through the morning. D Shawn came in at 8, steady and present, and they moved through the final sections with the rhythm of people who know what they're doing and trust each other to do it, which was still true even with everything that had happened and everything that still needed to settle between them. At 10:43, Marcus' phone buzzed.
A text from Olivia, two words, "It's starting." He typed back, "You're ready." No response for a while, which meant she was in it, which was right. He worked. He kept his phone in his pocket. He did not check it every 5 minutes, which required a specific and sustained act of will that he declined to think too hard about. At 129, it buzzed again.
Renick went first. Personal disclosure motion. He had documentation. My father's investment, dates, meeting records from the property. Someone gave him access to calendar information.
Marcus read that and his stomach tightened. He wrote Whitmore. Whitmore shut it down before I could. He said in Marcus, he actually said this in the full boardroom. He said, "Paul, we are not in the business of regulating who our CEO's father in with his private.