You talk about her like she's the person you think out loud to. He did not have an immediate answer to that. She told me hard years show you what you're made of. Lily said she's smart. She picked up her apple juice and this time actually drank it.
I don't want to go and I also kind of want to go. Is that allowed? That's extremely allowed. Marcus said, "I feel the same way. If I hate it," she said.
"Can we come back?" "We can always come back." Okay. She stood up, clearly deciding the hard portion of the conversation was complete. Can we watch the movie now?
Yeah, he said. Yeah, we can watch the movie. She headed for the living room. At the doorway, she stopped and looked back. Dad, she said, "Yeah, I think you've been waiting a long time to say yes to something for yourself."
Then she disappeared around the corner and Marcus Reed sat at his kitchen table for 60 seconds without moving because his 8-year-old daughter had just seen him more clearly than most adults had managed in 3 years. Clare sent her answer on a Wednesday, 21 days after she received the email. She spent three of those 21 days writing and rewriting it. Not because she didn't know what she wanted to say. Marcus had been right about that from the beginning, but because she was precise and she needed the words to be exactly right.
This was not a casual acceptance. It was a statement of terms. She accepted the SVP position. She accepted the formal written acknowledgement and asked in her acceptance email that it be shared internally, not filed privately. If the acknowledgement existed, it should exist where it could do something. and she attached as a condition of her acceptance a three-page proposal for a new internal structure she was calling the employee accountability review program.
A process by which workers who believed they had been incorrectly blamed for company failures could have their cases reviewed by an independent panel with actual authority to correct the record. She called it the ERP. Denise, who she showed it to before she sent it, said, "You named a workplace reform program after a gunfighter." "It seemed appropriate," Clare said. "It's perfect," Denise said.
She sent it on Wednesday at 2:15 in the afternoon. By 4:00, she had a response from Harrove Keller's new CEO, a woman named Ranata Oay, who had taken the helm 6 months earlier that contained exactly one sentence before the formal acceptance language. This is exactly the kind of proposal we needed someone to be bold enough to make. Clare read it twice. Then she walked four offices down and knocked on Marcus' door.
He looked up. I'm going back, she said. He held her gaze for a moment. You sent the ER proposal with conditions. They said yes.
They said yes. Something moved through his expression real and warm and without any qualification. Good. He said that's really good, Clare. I know.