Instead, he said, "Because I've been watching you fight for everyone else's future for four Saturdays now, and nobody is fighting for yours, and I'm not built to watch that." The silence after that was different from all the previous ones. "Okay," she said. Her voice was quiet. Not small, Olivia Bennett's voice was never small, but soft in a way it hadn't been before, like something had lowered. Okay, tell me what we need to do.
They worked on the phone for 90 minutes that night. Marcus at his desk, Olivia at her kitchen table, the proposal document open on both their screens at once, her reading sections aloud, and him asking questions, pushing, pulling, finding the places where she undersold herself, and the places where the data could carry more weight than it was currently being asked to carry. At 9:30, she said, "Section 4. I keep writing it like I'm asking for permission." You are. I know.
I hate it. Stop asking for permission. Write it like it's already happening, like it exists and you're inviting them to be part of it. A pause then. That's a completely different document.
That's a funded document, he said. She laughed, short, surprised, tired. The laugh of someone who has been staring at a problem so long that hearing someone name it differently feels like a window opening. Same time Thursday, she asked. I'll bring coffee, he said.
You don't have to bring coffee every time. Olivia, I'm going to bring coffee every time. She was quiet for a moment. Then, good night, Marcus. Good night.
He sat at his desk after the call ended with his hand still on the phone and the document still glowing on his screen. And he thought about what was happening with the cleareyed honesty of a man who had spent 3 years building walls and could now feel with physical certainty exactly how far they had come down. He was falling for her. He had been for weeks, probably since the morning she had handed him a coffee and looked at him like a complete human being. Maybe since the morning she had tilted her head and smiled at her own ruined wall and refused to be anything less than herself.
He sat with that fact for a while. Then he opened his phone and sent a message to a number he hadn't called in a long time. His college friend Darius, who had known him since they were 19 years old at Georgia State University, who had been at Denise's funeral and had called every week for the first year and had never once pretended that grief had a schedule. The message said, "I think something is happening." Darius replied in 4 minutes. "About time.
Who is she? " Marcus smiled at his phone in the dark. He didn't answer, but he was still smiling when he turned out the light. Thursday morning came with the particular cool clarity of an October day in Atlanta that hadn't quite decided how serious it was about fall. Yet the kind of morning that makes you feel for about 45 minutes before the day gets heavy, like things might actually be all right. Marcus was at Olivia's door at 8:00 a.m. with two coffees and a legal pad with three pages of handwritten notes.
She opened the door, looked at the legal pad. You wrote things down, she said. I always write things down. I'm a note person. I'm a keep it in my head person.