Chapter 8: The Reason
1109 Words
The text came at 11:14 on a Monday morning.
I'm in your building. Lobby. I have a question about structural assessments for a property my firm is looking at. Professional question. Five minutes.
Marcus read it twice.
He typed: You could have called.
I was in the area.
Damon.
Five minutes. Professional.
Marcus put his phone down. Picked it up. Put it down again. Looked at his screen for thirty seconds doing nothing useful. Then he typed: Lobby's on the ground floor. Tell reception you're here to see Marcus Osei.
He straightened his desk for no reason.
Damon looked exactly the same as he always looked, which Marcus was beginning to resent. Charcoal today, open collar, the unhurried posture of a man who had decided a long time ago that rushing was for other people. He stood in the lobby holding a thin folder and nodded when Marcus came out of the lift, professional, contained.
They shook hands for the receptionist.
Marcus signed him in.
They took the lift to the third floor in silence. Marcus's colleague Drew passed them in the corridor and Marcus introduced Damon as a client contact and Drew shook his hand and kept walking and Marcus thought: I just lied to a colleague's face with the same ease I lied to Zara in a grocery store and something is happening to me that I cannot track.
He closed his office door.
Damon sat down across from his desk and opened the folder and placed a single printed page on the surface between them. Marcus looked at it. It was a structural assessment report, legitimate, professional, the kind of document that required actual expertise to read.
"Briar Point development," Damon said. "My firm is considering a position in the company building it. The foundations report has flagged something and our analyst doesn't know if it's a deal-breaker or standard language. I need someone who actually knows what they're reading."
Marcus looked at the report. Then at Damon.
"You came to my office."
"You're a structural engineer."
"There are other structural engineers."
"I trust your read," Damon said. Simply. Without decoration.
Marcus held his gaze for a moment. Then he picked up the report.
He read it. He read it properly because whatever else was happening he was still good at his job and the document deserved actual attention. He found the flagged section in the foundations assessment, read the language, understood immediately what the analyst had not.
"It's standard," he said. "Clause fourteen, the load variance notation. It looks alarming if you don't know what you're looking at. It's a disclosure buffer. Every major development in Crestfield uses the same language."
Damon watched him. "You're sure."
"Yes."
"Not a deal-breaker."
"Not even close."
Damon nodded slowly. He took the report back. Looked at it for a moment. Put it in the folder.
"Thank you," he said.
"That's it?" Marcus said. "That's the five minutes?"
"That was the question."
"You drove to my building, signed in, came to my office for a one-sentence answer."
"Two sentences," Damon said. "You said not even close."
Marcus leaned back in his chair. Looked at him. "Why are you here."
Damon held the folder on his knee. Said nothing.
"The report was real," Marcus said. "I can see that. The question was real. But that's not why you came."
A beat of silence.
"No," Damon said. "It's not."
"So why."
Damon looked at the window behind Marcus's desk, the one that faced the Crestfield skyline, grey and honest in the Monday morning light. He looked like a man choosing between two versions of a sentence, picking the one that cost less.
"Saturday dinner," he said finally. "What Jade said. About energy. About us being important to each other."
"What about it."
"I've been thinking about it since Saturday."
"Damon."
"Not like that." He looked back at Marcus. "I've been thinking about what it would look like. If this were simple. If there were no Zara. No Jade. No Friday night and everything that comes with it. If we had just met. Normal way. No complications."
Marcus said nothing.
"I keep running it," Damon said. "The version where it's clean. Where it's just two people. And the thing that bothers me, the thing I cannot get out of my head, is that the answer is obvious. In the clean version it's completely obvious."
The office was quiet. Down the corridor someone was on a call, voice muffled through the wall. The city went about its business outside the window.
"You shouldn't have come here," Marcus said.
"I know."
"This is my workplace."
"I know."
"If someone sees us and mentions it to Jade or Zara."
"I know, Marcus. I know all of it." He leaned forward slightly, elbows on knees. "I needed to see you somewhere that wasn't a restaurant with our girlfriends watching and a supplements aisle where I could pretend it was accidental. I needed to sit across from you in a room and just. Look at you. And know what I'm dealing with."
Marcus looked back at him.
"And?" he said.
Damon held his gaze.
"And it's worse than the supplements aisle," he said.
The sentence sat between them taking up considerably more space than seven words had any right to.
Marcus stood up. Walked to the window. Stood with his back to the room and his hands in his pockets and looked at Crestfield going about its Monday without any awareness of what was happening on the third floor of a building on Whitmore Street.
"You can't do this," he said. "You can't come here and say things like that and go home to Jade tonight like nothing happened."
"I know."
"Then why."
"Because I am losing my mind," Damon said, "very quietly, and I needed you to know that."
Marcus stood at the window.
He thought about Zara. About Jade's face at dinner, open and happy and full of trust. About four people at a table and the clean version of a story that did not exist.
He turned around.
Damon was watching him with the expression that had no name, the one that filed things.
"Go back to work," Marcus said quietly.
Damon stood. Picked up the folder. Straightened his jacket.
He walked to the door.
His hand on the handle.
"Marcus."
"Don't."
A pause.
He left.
Marcus stood in his office for three minutes not moving.
Then he sat down, opened his laptop, and stared at the Halton Grove files until the words stopped meaning anything.
His phone was face-down on the desk.
He did not touch it.
He made it forty minutes.
- Writer
