And the room usually complies. He paused. That works well in business. Depends on the situation whether it works everywhere else. She looked at him for a long moment.
Something moved behind her eyes that he couldn't name. That's the most precise thing anyone has said to me about him in 2 weeks, she said quietly. I just call it how I see it. I know. She picked up the tablet again, which he understood as the signal that the personal part of the conversation was over.
Thank you, Marcus. He stood. Anything else you need? She started to say something. He could see at the beginning of a sentence a thought that crossed her face before she pulled it back.
And then she said, "No, that's everything. Thank you." He left. He stood in the elevator on the way down and looked at the buttons on the panel. He had replaced three of those buttons in the last year.
He knew every one of them. He thought about the sentence she hadn't finished. He thought about it for a long time. Ava noticed at first the way Ava noticed most things. It was a Saturday, 2 weeks after his meeting with Victoria, and Ava had somehow ended up at the office because Marcus had brought her in on weekends occasionally when he needed to run quick inspections and couldn't find coverage for her at short notice.
She was used to the building used to wandering with a book while he worked, and the staff adored her because she was 10 years old and already operated with a social grace that most adults spent their whole lives chasing. She was sitting in the maintenance breakroom reading when Victoria walked past the open door, saw Marcus's daughter, and stopped. Marcus was across the room going over the work order for the week, and he looked up and watched without saying anything as Victoria Langford knocked on the open door and said, "Hi, you must be Ava." Ava looked up from her book completely unbothered. "And you must be the boss," she said.
Victoria blinked. Then she actually laughed. A real one short and surprised. Nothing like the practiced laugh she used in meetings. That's what they tell me.
She said, "My dad talks about this building a lot." Ava said he loves it. He won't say he does, but he does. Marcus said from across the room. Ava, what?
It's true. Victoria glanced at him. He gave her the face of a man who had long since surrendered to being outmaneuvered by a 10-year-old. Victoria looked back at Ava. "Can I ask what you're reading?"
Ava held up the cover. It was a worn paperback copy of A Wrinkle in Time. "It's my mom's copy," Ava said. She used to read it to me before she got sick. The room went very still.