"I'm not easy," she said. "I work too much. I prepare remarks for conversations about my own feelings. I didn't know how to ask for what I wanted for so long that I almost let someone else decide it for me." "I know," he said.
I'm telling you the hard version, she said, because you deserve the honest version. I know, he said again. I'm telling you the hard version, too. She looked at him. Then she said, I don't want to be the CEO to you.
I want to be I just want to be Victoria. You've been Victoria to me for 3 years, he said. I just wasn't brave enough to say it. She reached out and put her hand on his arm. Not dramatic, not performed, just a hand, a person, a decision made quietly in a room full of people who weren't watching.
"Okay," she said. "Okay," he said. They stood like that for a moment. Then the CFO appeared at Victoria's shoulder with a tablet and an apologetic expression, and she glanced at him and back at Marcus with a look that was simultaneously exasperated and alive in a way that made something warm run through his chest. I have to go be the CEO for about 40 more minutes, she said.
I have to go check the riser stability on the stage, he said. She laughed. The real one tonight, she said. Dinner, real conversation. No agendas.
I'll cook, he said. She blinked. You cook eggs, he said. I cook eggs. She laughed again harder this time and turned and walked back into the room. and Marcus watched her go with the particular feeling of a man who has finally after a long time in the cold stepped into the warmth and decided to stay.
6 months later, the Meridian partnership had stabilized and grown. The company was healthier than it had been in years. The toxic board members had been replaced through a governance restructuring that Adrien Park had pushed through with the quiet, decisive force of someone who had been waiting for the right moment for a long time. Hawthorne had moved on to his next target, which was Marcus suspected his primary skill. Moving on, Victoria had rebuilt, not just the company, herself.
There was something different in how she moved through the building now through rooms, through days, less armor, more actual presence. She still prepared remarks for difficult conversations that never fully went away. But she gave them to Marcus first, and he would read them and say, "This is good, but you don't need the third paragraph. Just say the thing." And she would take the third paragraph out and say the thing, and it was always better.
Marcus had accepted a leadership position overseeing operations across all Langford properties, which was a significant expansion of his role and came with a significant change in title and compensation. Gerald, who had recommended him for it, had done so in an email so full of genuine pride that Marcus had read it three times and then saved it. And Ava, Ava had become the kind of center of gravity that certain people are the fixed point around which everything good naturally orbits. She and Victoria had a relationship that Marcus had not engineered and did not manage because it hadn't needed engineering or managing. It had simply happened the way things happen between people who are honest with each other from the beginning.