And he understood she meant not just the kitchen, but the audit, the board meeting, the press statement, the worker committee, all of it. This is me deciding. I'd rather have a smaller version of something real than a larger version of something hollow. He looked at her. Your father, he said, she held his gaze.
You're not him, I know. A pause. I needed to prove it to myself. He reached across the table and put his hand over hers. She looked down at it.
Then she turned her hand over the way Amara had. The same gesture automatic and unhesitating and held on. They sat like that for a while. The apartment quiet, the city outside going about its business. The drawings on the fridge, the coffee going slightly cold, the ordinary, irreplaceable architecture of a life.
Richard's lawyers are already talking, she said eventually. I figured it's going to be loud for a while. I can handle loud, he said. As long as I know what's actually true. She squeezed his hand once.
Honest or nothing, she said. That's the deal, he said. That's the deal, she agreed. Outside, Chicago did what Chicago did in early spring. Threw weather at the windows without ceremony.
Cold air pressing against warm glass, the city insisting on its own enormity, regardless of whatever small and human things were being decided inside it. Darius did not mind. Small and human things were in his experience the only things that ever actually mattered. He got up to refill the coffee. Victoria picked up Amara's chapter book from the corner of the table where Amara had left it.
She opened it to the first page. She started reading. He refilled both cups and came back to the table and sat down and didn't say anything. And she didn't say anything. And the apartment held them both in its quiet without asking anything of either one, which was exactly what both of them needed, and exactly what it had been doing in its modest and unhurried way since a stormy November night when a man had pulled over on Michigan Avenue because something in a woman's posture looked like a kind of tired he recognized and offered her the only thing he had that was worth offering, a place where nobody needed anything from her except her.
The investigation into Richard Vale took 11 weeks. Darius knew this not because he was following it closely, but because the people around him were and because Chicago is a city where business news travels the way weather travels through walls under doors into conversations you weren't trying to have. His crew at the Westside facility talked about it. The workers on the dock talked about it. His mother called twice to ask if he was being careful, by which she meant several things at once, and he told her yes, by which he meant all of them.
He kept working. That was the part that nobody in the press seemed interested in, which suited him fine. While the investigation ran its course, and Richard's lawyers maneuvered, and the business press published think pieces about corporate accountability and the structural failures of middle management reporting chains. Darius Cole got up every morning at 5:30 and went to work and fixed things that were broken and documented what he found and went home to his daughter and made dinner and read the chapter books and lived his life. He did not find this difficult.