Chapter 179 Ten Years From Now

Chapter 179 Ten Years From Now
Ten years changes the texture of things without changing the substance.

I understood this at thirty-three in a way I hadn’t at twenty-three… not as wisdom, just as recognition. The same things were true at thirty-three that had been true at twenty-three. They simply felt differently underfoot. More settled. Less sharp. Like stones that had been in a river long enough to lose their edges.

Tuesday morning. November.

My desk at Callum Corporation.

The portrait on the lobby wall below, I had passed it coming in, the way I passed it every morning, the acknowledgment that had become so natural it no longer required conscious thought. My father looking at the lobby. The lobby looking back at him.

Lisa was at school.

This was still a new enough fact that it occasionally surprised me. The specificity of it… Lisa, at a desk somewhere in the building three streets over, sitting with other children her size, learning the shape of things. She had gone on her first day with the complete composure of a child who had decided to be interested rather than afraid and had come home that afternoon with a drawing she presented with the satisfaction of work properly done.

The drawing was on my office wall.

It would stay there.

Damien and Lena’s son, four years old, named for no one in particular and entirely himself, attended a different school in a different district but had developed with Lisa… the friendship of two children who had known each other since before either of them understood what knowing someone meant. They saw each other at family dinners and behaved like co-conspirators, which Damien found quietly alarming and which Lena found entirely correct.

Odette was ninety-five.

She was still writing.

The memoir had been published three years ago and had sold consistently since… not spectacularly, but steadily, which was the kind of sales that meant the right readers were finding it. She had started something new. She wouldn’t say what. She attended her monthly cardiac appointments with Dr. Fielding, who had now been managing her situation for six years and who had developed for her the particular respect of a doctor for a patient who had survived longer and better than the numbers suggested because she had decided to.

She still held court as always.

Nadia ran the advisory panel with the efficient authority of someone who had built the role into something more substantial than its original brief. She had added two members and had developed a methodology document that Christine had put into the Foundation’s resource library. Three other Foundations and two regulatory bodies had requested copies.

She visited the office monthly.

Always brought something… a new risk identification she had developed, a situation she had flagged, an observation from the Edinburgh consultancy that was relevant to the corporate governance programme.

Always stopped at the portrait.

Every time.

Thirty seconds. The acknowledgment. Then upstairs.

The Singapore project was in its fourth expansion phase.

Priscilla managed it now with a team of twelve and had expanded the original vision into something that covered six markets. The letter from those first organisations… this changes what we can build, had become something Christine printed and gave to every new scholarship recipient.

The Foundation had forty-seven mentors.

Twenty-three of them were alumni.

Clara Bennett from Edinburgh was one of them. She had graduated the previous year and had started something… exactly as promised, that was small and well-built and pointed in the right direction. She sent Christine an update every six months. Christine read them at board meetings with the satisfaction of someone watching a beginning become a middle.

Zael ran Morrow Enterprises the way Arthur had always hoped someone would run it, with the same precision his grandfather had brought and with something additional that Arthur hadn’t had time to develop. The capacity to be present in the ordinary moments alongside the significant ones.

He still made breakfast on Saturday mornings.

He still made terrible jokes in the delivery style he had been developing since I told him about David’s breakfast jokes three years into our marriage. His delivery had improved. The jokes had not. He seemed to find this an acceptable ratio.

Lisa had started laughing at them.

Genuinely.

Not the polite laughter of a child who understood social obligation. The real kind… the kind that arrived before she could decide whether to express it.

He had said nothing about this when it first happened.

Just noted it.

Filed it somewhere.

The expression of a man who had been working toward something for a long time and had just received confirmation it was working.

I was at my desk at eleven-thirty with the quarterly board report open when the door opened.

Zael came in.

Closed the door.

Sat in the chair across the desk.

I looked up.

He was wearing the expression that meant something had occurred to him that he wanted to share immediately before it lost the quality of immediacy. The expression that had appeared increasingly over the past years as his walls had not just come down but become something he didn’t require anymore. Not managed absence. Genuine absence.

He looked at me across the desk.

“I have a terrible joke,” he said.

I put the quarterly report down.

Stared at him.

“I’ve been working on it for two years.”

“Two years,” I repeated.”

“Yes, two years,” he confirmed. “Since you told me about your father’s breakfast jokes. About the delivery.” He looked entirely serious. “I’ve been developing mine.” A pause. “This one is ready.”

I looked at him.

This man.

At the desk across from me at eleven-thirty on a Tuesday morning.

Ten years of Tuesdays.

Ten years of this desk and this office and the portrait in the lobby and the founding charter on the wall and Lisa at school and Odette writing and Singapore delivering and Nadia stopping at the portrait every month.

Ten years of him.

“Alright, tell me,” I smiled.

He straightened slightly.

Like a man who had been working on something for two years and was about to deploy it.

“Why did the building fall down?” he asked.

I waited and listened.

He paused for exactly the right amount of time… the David Callum pause, the one that made you think the punchline might actually be worth waiting for.

“It didn’t have good foundations.”

Completely straight-faced.

Then he laughed.

Before I had the chance to not laugh.