She sat on the sofa and allowed herself, finally, to remember the opening of the program—the first week in that eastern city when the air was sharp and the cohort wore name tags like armor. She had called Marcus from a bathroom stall on day three because a facilitator had asked them to describe their leadership origin stories and a white man from Denver had spoken for twelve minutes about his grandfather's company without noticing that the room's patience had expired. Nia had laughed into the phone until she cried. Marcus had said, "Come home if you need to." She had said, "I need to stay." Both sentences had been true. She wondered now whether that exchange had taught him the wrong lesson: that her staying always mattered more than her knowing.
Perhaps it had. Perhaps she had collaborated, unknowingly, in her own exclusion by praising his steadiness so often that steadiness became a prison he could not ask her to open from the outside. The thought did not absolve him. It complicated her rage into something more useful: responsibility shared unevenly, like a couch carried up stairs, one person taking more weight without announcing the imbalance until the landing.
She called him. He answered from the grocery store, ambient noise of carts and fluorescent hum around his voice.
"I'm at home thinking about Denver Man's grandfather speech," she said.
Marcus laughed, immediate. "The twelve-minute origin story."
"I told you to keep the home fires burning. I never told you to burn alone."