I know it already. He said, I know you know it. Okay, I'm working on it. She said, I know that, too. She exhaled.
You're infuriatingly calm. One of us has to be. She almost smiled. He saw her stop it. I should go, she said.
I have the board meeting at 8. You should sleep. I should. I probably won't. She picked up her briefcase.
Thank you for dinner. For Amara. I'll tell her you said so. Don't. She already won the negotiation.
I don't want to encourage her. He walked her to the door. She paused at the threshold. And in the 3 seconds she stood there, he had the sense of a person deciding something not about him, about herself. I haven't brought anyone into my life in a long time.
She said, "I'm not good at it. You stayed for soup." He said, "You washed the dishes. You answered every question a 9-year-old threw at you without checking your phone once." He looked at her.
You're better at it than you think. She looked at him for a long moment, then she left. He locked the door. He stood in his hallway in the quiet of a Tuesday night in January and thought, "Something is changing. Something has already changed."
And the question is not whether to stop it, but whether when it arrives at whatever it is becoming, both of them will be able to hold it without either one letting it become something else. He went to check on Amara. She was asleep with the light still on and the book open across her chest and a small smile on her face that had nothing to do with him or with the soup or with the interesting woman who had come for the board meeting preparation and stayed for cornbread. He turned the light off. He went to bed.
He did not sleep for a long time. The second thing that happened in January was that Richard Vale decided to start watching. Darius did not know this yet. He would not know it for weeks. But Richard Vale, who was Victoria's chief strategy officer, and who had been at Langford Logistics for four years, and who had spent those four years quietly building a case for a boardroom restructuring that would consolidate significant authority in his direction, had noticed the change in Victoria, not the warmth, he was not a man who tracked warmth.
He tracked leverage and he tracked vulnerability. And what he had noticed was that for the first time in 4 years, Victoria Langford had something she appeared to want to protect. That was all he needed. He put someone on it. Not a private investigator, Richard was too smart for anything that direct.