Marcus sat on the sofa as if the cushions might reject him. He rubbed his palms on his knees. Simone remained on the console bench in the foyer until Nia gestured, once, toward the other end of the sofa. Simone crossed the room and sat with the careful posture of a woman who understood that proximity was not the same as welcome.
"Four months ago," Marcus began, "Horizon Analytics eliminated my division. Forty-two people. I was one of them. They called it restructuring. They gave us a severance that looked decent on paper and then disappeared into the mortgage and Amara's school fees and the credit cards we had already been carrying."
Nia's training had taught her to listen for the shape of a narrative, the places where speakers protected themselves. She listened now for those places and found them everywhere.
"You didn't tell me," she said.
"You were in week nine of the cohort," Marcus said. "You had just presented to the board track. You called me that night crying because you thought you'd finally broken through. You said if you finished, the director track was real. Not theoretical. Real. I was going to tell you that weekend. Then the severance math got ugly. Then the mortgage notice came. Then I thought—if I can just hold this until you finish—"
"You thought," Nia said, "that my career was more important than my right to know my family was losing its house."