Conference Room C

Conference Room C had a whiteboard that didn't fully erase, so every meeting held in it took place inside the ghosts of previous meetings. Amara liked it for exactly that reason. It kept people humble. Daniel arrived at 8:58 with two coffees and put hers down in front of her without asking how she took it. She looked at the cup. Oat milk, no sugar. Correct. "You asked the barista," she said. "I asked Greg. Greg knows everyone's coffee. It's Greg's whole —" "Don't say it." "I wasn't going to." "You were." "I was," Daniel admitted, and sat, and for one unguarded second they were almost grinning at each other, and Amara felt the almost-grin happen and shut it down like a fire door. She walked him through Hollings. Three years in ninety minutes — the family, the board, the son who would inherit and didn't want to, the merger, the footnote clause. Daniel listened the way she'd noticed he did everything, which was completely, no phone, asking a question only when the question was good. He filled half the imperfectly-erased whiteboard with his own handwriting, which was terrible, genuinely terrible, the handwriting of a doctor or a serial killer, and she told him so, and he said his second-grade teacher had said the same thing and that he'd taken it as a target rather than a criticism, and Amara laughed. She didn't decide to. It just came out, a real one, short and surprised, and it bounced off the bad whiteboard and they both heard it. Daniel put the marker down. "Can I say a thing," he said, "that I should probably not say." "Almost certainly not." "I'm going to say it anyway." He leaned against the table, arms folded, and the easy face was, for once, not easy. "I found out about you before I took this job. Not — that sounds strange. I mean the recruiter mentioned there was a strong internal candidate. I asked who. They told me. I looked you up. I read everything with your name on it I could find." He paused. "And I took the job anyway. So when you looked at me on Monday like I'd done something to you — you were right. I did. I knew there was a you, and I sat down at that desk anyway, because I wanted the role and I told myself the internal politics weren't my problem to solve." The room was very quiet. One of the ghost-meetings on the whiteboard, half-erased, said Q2 SYNERGIES in someone's hopeful hand. "Why are you telling me this," Amara said. "Because you've been managing me for three days. Polite. Efficient. Lid on everything. And I'd rather you were actually furious with me than professionally gracious at me, because the gracious thing — I can't get under it. There's nothing to fix. It's just a wall with a smile painted on it." He spread his hands. "So. Be furious. I earned it. I'd genuinely prefer it." Amara looked at him for a long moment. The infuriating thing — the thing she would not be telling Greg, or anyone, ever — was that he was right again. The graciousness was a wall. She'd built it on Monday morning and she'd been living behind it since, and it was airless back there, and she was tired. "Fine," she said. "You want furious. Here's furious." She stood up, because furious was a standing thing. "I am not angry that they hired you. You're — from the forty pages of you I've now also read, you're good, you'll be good, fine. I'm angry that they never told me I was out of the running. I found out from a man with egg salad. They let me be patient for three years and then they let me find out by accident, and the message that sends, Daniel, the actual message, is that my patience was the product. That I was most useful to them as someone who would wait quietly and not make it weird." Her voice did something at the edge and she let it. "So no, I'm not gracious. I'm just very, very practiced. And I would genuinely like to win the Hollings account so hard that the next time a role opens up, the cost of not telling me is too high. That's the deal I'm actually offering you. Help me be too expensive to overlook." Daniel didn't say sounds good. He stood up too, and picked up the bad marker, and on the one clean corner of the ghost-ridden whiteboard he wrote, in his serial-killer handwriting, two words and underlined them twice: TOO EXPENSIVE. "Ninety days," he said. "Let's make you a problem they can't afford." And Amara, against every instinct she had brought into Conference Room C, felt the fire door open just slightly — and did not, this time, slam it shut.