Not because she had asked, not because she had forgotten to eat. She had learned to eat regular meals now. Another thing that had shifted in the last year without her fully noticing the shift. He brought it because he happened to be passing her building on his way from a meeting. And he thought she might want company.
He texted from the lobby. I have sandwiches. You eating? She wrote back, "Give me 5 minutes." He came up.
Patrick, who had not yet met Marcus, looked at him with the evaluative precision of someone protecting a calendar. And Marcus handed him a sandwich from the bag without being asked and said, "You're Patrick, right?" She mentioned, "You organized the entire filing system before she arrived." "That's exceptional." Patrick stared at the sandwich, then at Marcus, then accepted that this man was allowed in.
Marcus sat across from her desk. She ate her sandwich. He ate his. "How's the team?" He asked.
Good. Josephine is going to be extraordinary if I can give her room to be the young guy in the corner, Ethan. He's going to be the one who finds the case nobody else was brave enough to bring forward. I can already tell. You can tell that on day three.
I could tell in the first meeting, she said. He asked the question everyone else was thinking. What question? Whether any of it was real or just policy on paper? Marcus looked at her.
What did you say? I said, "The structure makes stalling more costly than resolution." He was quiet for a moment. "That's exactly the right answer." "I know," she said.
She took a bite of her sandwich. "You built your team the same way. I watched you at Meridian. You always hired the person who asked the uncomfortable question, not the person who had the smoothest answer." He looked slightly surprised.
"I didn't know you noticed that." "I told you," she said. "I noticed things." He looked at her across the desk. This woman who had once been a name badge four offices down and was now the SVP of the satellite office he passed on his way to work eating a sandwich he had brought in a city they both now lived in a life that had assembled itself around two decisions his decision to stop and her decision to get in the truck.
Clare he said yeah are you happy? She looked at him not with surprise not with the deflection she would have used a year ago. not I'm fine or I'm managing or any of the managed versions of herself she had spent so long maintaining. She just looked at him. Yes, she said. Yeah, I actually am.