Same thing. Not exactly the same. Darius. Marcus' voice had the particular warmth it got when he was about to say something true that he had been holding for a while. You kept those records for three years.
Three years of filing parallel documentation because you trusted your own eyes more than the system. That's not just logs. That's character, man. That's who you are. Darius looked at the windshield.
Yeah, he said. I'm good. You sure? Marcus. I'm just checking.
I know. I'm sure. He paused. I'm genuinely good. That's not something I've said and meant in a while.
A beat. Yeah, Marcus said. I can hear that. They talked for 20 more minutes about nothing important basketball. Marcus's ongoing feud with his upstairs neighbor over parking.
Amara's letter to the publisher, which Marcus had heard about through Darius's mother and found deeply funny in the best possible way. By the time Darius got off the phone, his lunch break was over and he was late getting back to the facility, which was unusual for him. And Tomas looked at him and looked at the clock and looked at him again and said nothing, which was the right call. The first committee meeting was on a Wednesday morning in late May at the South Loop facility in a conference room that had been set up with a round table specifically because Victoria had told Elaine Park she didn't want anyone at the head of it. Darius arrived 8 minutes early.
He was not the first one there. A woman named Guadalupe, who ran the sorting line at the North Side facility, and who had been filing safety reports for 6 years with the patient persistence of someone who refuses to stop believing the system will eventually work, was already seated when he arrived. She looked at him when he sat down. "You're the one with the logs," she said. "Guadalupe," he said.
"I've read some of your reports." She looked at him carefully. "They disappeared. I know they don't anymore." She held his gaze for a long moment.
"They better not," she said. Nine other people filed in over the next 8 minutes. Dock workers, a floor supervisor from the West Loop, a facilities coordinator who had been with Langford since it was a 12-person operation in a rented warehouse. People who knew things the way people who do the actual work always know things, and who had been trying to say those things into a system that was structured to lose them. The committee chair was not Victoria.