She was the CEO. He was in her private suite. He was a widowerower with a 10-year-old daughter and a maintenance uniform and a mortgage payment due in 9 days. He had absolutely no business standing here in this particular silence with this particular woman feeling whatever this thing was that had started warming up in his chest like a circuit that had finally found its ground. He zipped the dress all the way up ready for the gala Ms.
Langford, he said, and he left. He stood in the elevator going down and pressed the button for the lobby and stared at his own hands. 45 minutes later, he was standing at a service post in the ballroom, watching Victoria Langford move through the crowd in that midnight blue gown, composed again, flawless again, every inch the CEO that the room needed her to be. And he knew with the particular unwelcome clarity of a man who is very good at diagnosing problems, that he had just walked away from something real. He told himself it was the right move.
He told himself that all night. Ava was still awake when he got home. She was supposed to be asleep. She was sitting on the couch with her tablet watching something. She tried to quickly hide when he came through the door and he looked at her and looked at the tablet and said, "What time is it?
It's" She checked, made a face. "Okay, it's late. It's late. I was waiting for you." He sat down next to her, loosened the clip on his ID badge, let out a long, slow breath that he had been holding for approximately 4 hours.
Ava studied him the way she sometimes did with that unsettling accuracy that she had inherited from Angela. The ability to read a room, to read a face, to identify what a person was feeling before they'd identified it themselves. "You okay, Daddy?" "Long night," he said. She put her head on his arm.
He put his arm around her. "Something happened?" She asked. He thought about the room, the zipper, the mirror, her voice, quiet and precise as an employee or as a man. Nothing happened, he said.
Ava was quiet for a moment. Then she said, "You know that thing you always tell me about how the bravest thing you can do is tell the truth, even when it's scary." Marcus looked at her. "Yeah," he said slowly. "I know that thing.
You should listen to yourself more often," she said. Then she kissed him on the cheek, picked up her tablet, and patted off to her room. And Marcus Reed sat alone on that couch in the dark in the quiet house, and thought about a question he had already answered, and wondered if it was too late to answer it differently. It wasn't too late. But before he would get another chance, the world was about to get significantly more complicated because 3 days after the gayla, a name entered the picture that would change everything.
Richard Hawthorne was coming to Atlanta and he had already decided what Victoria Langford's future looked like. He just hadn't asked her yet. Three days after the gala, Marcus found out about Richard Hawthorne the same way he found out about most things that happened in that building. Not from a memo, not from a meeting, but from the walls themselves. He was replacing a sensor panel in the server room adjacent to the executive conference area on the 28th floor when he heard the voices through the ventilation duct.
He wasn't eavesdropping. He never eavesdropped. But the duct ran directly behind the conference room wall. And the building's insulation on that floor was something Marcus had been trying to get upgraded for two years. And right now that was someone else's problem because the voices were clear and they were urgent.