You weren't afraid? No, he said. Why not? She genuinely wanted to know. He had leverage.
Or he thought he did. Marcus thought about it. Because what he was threatening to take my reputation, the perception of my business, whatever people would say. None of that was the actual thing. He looked at her.
The actual thing was the work and the crew and my daughter and the decision I'd made about who I was going to be. He paused. You can't threaten someone's integrity. You can only reveal whether it's there or not. Renick standing at my gate didn't have anything to do with my integrity.
It only had something to do with his. Olivia was quiet. I've been afraid my whole career. She said, not of failure. I told you that before.
I've been afraid that if I stopped being indispensable, people would leave. She looked at her hands. My whole professional life has been one long answer to a question. Nobody else knew I was asking. What was the question?
Marcus said, "Am I enough if the title goes away?" He let that sit then and now. She looked up at him. "I had a board meeting this week," she said slowly. "And the thing that got me through it wasn't my track record or my financial projections or my 300 slide presentation that I stayed up until 1:00 a. M.
Preparing." She paused. It was telling the truth about James Okaf for the thing I'd been most afraid to say. The thing that had no defense and no spin and no strategy. She held his gaze and the room Marcus. The room came toward me.
When I stopped protecting myself, the room came toward me. She paused. I've been solving the wrong equation for 12 years. What's the right equation? He said, "People don't need you to be perfect," she said.
"They need you to be real." She said it like someone saying something they've known for a moment and are going to carry for a lifetime. That's it. That's the whole thing. Marcus looked at her. Diane used to say something.
He said, she'd say, Marcus, the most powerful thing you can do in any room is want nothing from it except to tell the truth. He paused. I didn't fully understand it until a few years after she was gone. And then I understood it every day. Olivia looked at him for a long moment.
Then she sounds like someone I would have been afraid of. Why? Because she was clearly right about everything and I would have had to admit it immediately. A pause, which would have been very uncomfortable. Marcus smiled.