The chief financial officer wanted the operating committee restructured. Her communications lead wanted a magazine profile. The head of Europe wanted a title with the word global in it. Even the security guard on the lobby desk wanted her to remember his name, which was a small and decent want, but a want. Elliot Vance wanted to know whether a signature was real.
That was the entire inventory. It disoriented her more than any threat Conrad had made. On the 11th night at 11:50, his phone rang while he was explaining a routing pattern, and he answered it in the middle of his own sentence. Marin watched his face reorganize itself completely. Hey, Bug.
No, you're not in trouble. A pause. Okay. Okay, listen. Is it the one with the foam balls or the one where you have to write the paragraph about orbits?
Another pause. He closed his eyes and laughed. And it was the first time she had heard him do that because I moved it. It's on the bottom shelf under the printer because somebody left it on the kitchen table and somebody's father got tired of eating dinner next to Neptune. He talked to his daughter for 9 minutes. $14 million of allegedly stolen money sat in a folder on the tables between them, and he did not once glance at it.
He walked her through where the paint was, told her not to do the whole poster tonight, told her twice that she could not glue anything without an adult in the room, and then said, "I'll be home in 40 minutes. Leave the light on. I'll come say good night." And hung up. "Sorry," he said. "Don't be." She was looking at him differently and he did not notice which was somehow the point.
Marin Callaway had been raised by a man who ran a company and she had loved him and she had understood from a young age that his attention was a resource allocated according to priority and that she was a high priority but never the first one. She had made her peace with that at 13 and had built an entire adulthood on the assumption that this was the natural order of serious lives. And here was a man who had just put a multi-million dollar fraud investigation on hold without hesitation and without apology to tell a 10-year-old where the poster paint was. "Does she know what you're doing?" Marin asked. "She knows I'm working late on something at the office.
That's all she needs." He put his phone face down. She lost her mother when she was six. I made a decision then that she would never have to carry anything of mine. So far, I've kept it. That must cost you.