I'd like to." She stopped, looked at him with the expression of someone doing arithmetic and deciding to trust the answer. I'd like to have dinner, not as your employer. Ass. I know what you mean, he said. Is that Saturday works?
He said, but I have pancakes in the morning. Non-negotiable, she blinked. With your daughter, chocolate chip, he said she's coming up Saturday morning. Dana drops her at 9:00. I can be in LA by 6.
Something moved across Diane Callaway's face that he hadn't seen before. Not the beach smile, not the conference room control, something quieter and more unguarded. The kind of expression that surfaces when a person realizes the life on the other side of a door is more specific than they'd let themselves imagine. "6 p.m." she said. "6 p.m." he said.
She nodded once, opened the anti- room door, went back into the conference room, and the noise of Patricia's voice and Okafur's question and gold gathering his leather portfolio resumed. Marcus sat for a moment in the small room with the city behind the window and the timer on his phone that had read 72 hours 3 days ago and now read zero. He closed the timer, opened his contacts, typed a message to Dana, picking Lily up Sunday instead of Saturday. She okay to stay one more night? Dana replied in 4 minutes.
She'll be annoyed. Marcus, tell her the cereal is waiting. Dana, she'll survive. You good? He looked at the closed conference room door.
Thought about a recorded call and four technical disqualifications and a board vote of 5 to one. Thought about 72 hours and what a person did with them when they understood the shape of the problem. Thought about a smile that had turned away before it finished on a beach in Malibu in a table in a $68 motel and a 7-year-old who'd gotten a 92 on a fractions test and called it basically a 94. He typed, "Yeah." Getting there, he meant it more than he'd mint it in a while. He picked up his laptop, straightened his jacket, and went to find Hartwell to give her the rest of his documentation.
The work wasn't done. The audit would take 2 weeks. The formal board response longer than that, and there was a Cambria permit timeline that had been sitting with the city liaison for 11 days. There was a site report due Friday. There was a general contractor bid to finalize and a mechanical system scheduled to reset.
Now that Pacific Ridge was gone, there was a lot of work. He was good at the work. He was, it turned out, still good at it. Still the person who showed up early and fixed the canopy because it needed fixing and went back to his chair when it was done and didn't make it a thing.
He'd been not making it a thing for 4 years. Somewhere in the geometry of a Malibu beach in a $68 motel and a conference room on the 32nd floor, he'd started to think that wasn't the only way to be. He had pancakes to make on Saturday morning. Everything else could follow from