That was one of the best sentences I heard all week.
I told him so.
He gave a tired half smile.
“Don’t make too much of it. I’m usually not that poetic.”
Lucy tugged his sleeve.
“Daddy, is she the truck lady?”
He looked down.
“Yeah, baby.”
She nodded solemnly.
“I like trucks.”
“That makes two of us.”
She considered that.
Then held up her inhaler pouch.
“My daddy pays for my breathing medicine.”
Ray’s face did something then.
Not big.
Not public.
Just a tiny break at the corner of the mouth and eyes.
The look of a man who has been trying to keep his children from noticing the cost of staying afloat, and discovers they noticed anyway.
“I bet he does,” I said softly.
Inside, the board room was too small for the crowd.
So they moved us into the library.
Rows of chairs.
Fluorescent lights.
Books along the walls with titles about ambition and leadership and almost nothing about labor unless it came attached to history.
Arthur and Claire Mercer were already there.
He was silver-haired and handsome in the carefully assembled way wealth can buy.
She was poised, polished, and wearing the same expression she had worn outside the gym.
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