Whitley spent the remaining hour preparing for his future. The Wexley Group was reviewing leadership assignments across its northeastern properties, and he believed a regional director position was effectively his. He had personally improved the property's reported guest-satisfaction numbers by closing complaints he deemed unimportant and had kept operating costs low by running understaffed shifts. His expense reports showed a generous hospitality budget, and he maintained a top-floor suite as a permanent executive convenience, though much of its actual use had never been properly charged.
He called a regional acquaintance at midnight. "Friday at ten," he said, standing before his office window as the rain thinned over the street. "The chairwoman will find a spotless lobby. Every staffer in a line. By noon, they'll know who should be running the region."
"What about the problem tonight?" the acquaintance asked.
"Handled," Whitley replied. "A thief at my door, and I caught him."
Down the street, Marcus returned to his apartment and placed his folded uniform coat over a chair. He looked at the calendar above his kitchen table where the final semester's tuition deadline had been circled in red for three weeks. Then he picked up a framed photograph of Ruth, taken outside her church in the best dress she owned, and let himself say the thing he had been too proud to tell Odessa in the diner.
"I don't know what I'm going to do now, Nana."
He sat for a long time without moving. Eventually he opened his laptop and began revising his resume, because the alternative was to lie awake imagining Grant Whitley's expression, and Ruth had not raised him to give a cruel man the rest of the night as well.
Wednesday arrived without the courtesy of giving Marcus a chance to recover from Tuesday. His alarm sounded at six, just as it had every morning for eight years, and he reached for the phone before remembering that there was no shift to get ready for. He lay looking at the water stain above his bedroom window and waited for the first manageable emotion to replace the hollow feeling in his chest. It did not come, so he got up, washed his face, and made breakfast as though routine might be a bridge he could walk across without looking down.
His apartment occupied the top floor of a narrow three-family building on the south side of the city. The landlord kept the rent reasonable because Marcus had fixed the downstairs handrail, checked the smoke detectors, and helped carry groceries for the oldest tenant during the winter. From his kitchen window he could see a bus stop, a corner laundromat, and a community garden with a fence that leaned a little farther each spring. The room was modest, but every shelf had been built or repaired by someone Marcus knew, and the old photograph of Ruth Hale on the refrigerator made it feel occupied even when he was alone.