And then the elevator closed and the moment went with it. Wednesday was good. She said, "Thank you. Procurement policy," he said. "It's what I'm here for." She almost smiled.
"Go back to Cambria going." He said. He drove back up the 101 with the windows down and the radio off and the particular feeling of a situation that was almost clear, not resolved. Not safe, but the shape of it visible now. The edges defined. Fitch would move in the 72-hour window.
Marcus would be ready. Hartwell would file and the board would see what they were going to see and whatever happened after that would happen after that. He called Lily from the road. You're driving, she said. I can hear the wind.
Handsfree, he said. Tell me something. I made a volcano for science, she said. With baking soda and the red stuff, vinegar. It went pretty far, she said.
Miss Patterson had to move back. That's a successful volcano, he said. Dad. Yeah. Are you okay?
He watched the coastline through the passenger window. The water was doing what it always did at this hour, going dark at the edges and holding the last light in the middle as if it knew something was ending and wanted to hold on to it a minute longer. Getting there. He said, "By Saturday. By Saturday," he said.
Chocolate chip. "Okay," she said. And she said it with the confidence of someone for whom his word was still a fixed point, which was the thing he'd been working to keep true since the morning in Phoenix when everything else had become unfixed. He drove the rest of the way in the dark, thinking about 72 hours and what Fitch would do with them. And underneath that, quieter, more stubborn thinking about an elevator that had closed before something had been said.
He was going to have to deal with that eventually. Not tonight. Tonight, he had a file to update and a site report to finish and a 72-hour window to prepare for, but eventually Hartwell filed on a Friday. Marcus knew because Diane sent him a single message at 10:12 a.m. It's done. Clock started.
No other text. He read it in the Cambria site office, set the phone face down on the desk, and spent the next 4 minutes finishing the paragraph of the site report he'd been writing before the message arrived. Then he picked the phone back up and started a timer. 72 hours. He spent Friday afternoon doing the thing he'd learned to do in Phoenix when his situation was in motion and there was nothing to do.