Daniel. Yeah, thank you. You came to a school science fair with a handmade sign, he said. You looked up anglerfish. You built a job from scratch and wrote travel restrictions into it for my kid.
He paused. We're nowhere near even. Don't thank me. A sound from her end that was not quite a laugh and not quite a cry and was the truest sound he had heard her make. Good night, she said.
Good night, Victoria. He set the phone down on the kitchen table. He looked at the property reports in front of him. The new job he was still learning, the apartment he'd built his world inside for 4 years. He thought about what she'd said.
The first person I wanted to call was you. He thought about what that meant not as a romantic notion, not as something soft and manageable, but as what it actually was. Wait. Responsibility. The specific gravity of being someone's first call.
The person they turned to when the professional armor came off and the real version of them needed somewhere to land. He had been that for Maya. He knew exactly how serious it was. He also knew exactly how much he wanted it. He turned off the kitchen light.
He went to check on Amara. She was asleep. Gerald in his usual position. Her science fair ribbon second place. Green ribbon pinned to the bulletin board above her desk next to a picture she had drawn of an angler fish that looked generously like an angler fish.
He stood there. Then he went to bed and he did not run through tomorrow's to-do list. He thought about the future, the real one, the one that was being built in real time without his full permission but with he was realizing his full participation and he let himself want it. Not carefully, not with conditions and contingencies and walls around the wanting. Just wanted it, all of it.
Which was for Daniel Brooks the most courageous thing he had done in 6 years. The Meridian Capital fight lasted 6 weeks. Daniel watched it from the inside, from his new position, from the late night phone calls, from the way Victoria's voice changed register depending on which version of the battle she was fighting that day.
Some nights she called at 10 and sounded like the CEO precise, strategic, three steps ahead of whatever the problem was. Other nights she called at 10 and sounded like a person, which was harder to listen to, and also the only version he actually needed to hear. He did not try to fix it. He had learned in the years of being the person Maya had called first that the most valuable thing you can give someone in crisis is not a solution. It is the specific quality of your attention.
The kind that says I am here. I am not leaving and I can hold this with you without dropping it. He gave her that. Every night she called. Every morning he checked in.