There's doing your job and there's doing what's right, Marcus said. And sometimes those two things aren't the same thing. I've been sitting with that all day." Andre put his hand briefly on the older man's shoulder. "Learn from it," he said.
"That's all any of us can do." He walked toward the exit. He was almost at the glass doors when he heard his name. He turned around. Clare Whitmore was crossing the lobby from the direction of the executive elevator.
She was still in the jacket she'd had on that morning, but something about the way she was carrying herself had changed. Not softer, exactly. Not diminished, but different. The CEO velocity, the forward-leaning purposefulness that was her habitual mode, had been replaced by something more deliberate, like a person who has been moving very fast for a long time and has just stopped voluntarily to look at where they're going. Can I have 5 minutes?
She said, I have to pick up my daughter at 3:15, he said. 5 minutes? She said again, not demanding, asking. They stood near the windows outside. Three of the remaining SUVs were being packed up.
The fourth sat at the far end of the lot where two investigators were still going through what he assumed were additional materials from Caldwell's vehicle. Clare put her hands in her jacket pockets and looked at him directly. I've been thinking about what to say to you since the elevator, she said. And I've been through probably 10 different versions and they all sound wrong because they're all really just different ways of explaining myself. and I don't think you need my explanation. I think you need something else.
What do I need? He said to hear me say it simply, she said. I was wrong. I made a fast decision based on surface level evidence because I was under pressure and because the surface level evidence was convenient and underneath that underneath the pressure and the convenience there was something I'm not proud of. an assumption I made about who you were likely to be based on what you were wearing and where you worked and what you were paid. And that assumption made it easier to accept a story that should have had a hundred more questions asked about it.
Andre listened. He didn't fill the silence when she paused. I am sorry, she said. For what it cost you this morning. For what it could have cost you and for 5 years of this company having you and not knowing what it had.
He looked at her for a moment. Do you know what my daughter does every morning? He said. Clare shook her head. She pours her own cereal.
He said, "She's eight. She's been doing it since she was six, since her mother died. Because she figured out that some mornings I need an extra few minutes, and she didn't want me to feel guilty about it." He let that sit for a second. She is the most capable person I know.