"Then that's the part you should fix," she would say, if he admitted somebody might go without money for three days because two systems didn't communicate. "The grandmother doesn't care how beautiful the spreadsheet is."
Callan learned to ask that question before he asked any other. Who was waiting on the other side of the number?
Three years after he joined the company, Hannah became ill with a sudden infection that progressed faster than anyone expected. There had been a morning when she complained of a fever and an evening when he was sitting beside a hospital bed trying to understand words spoken by exhausted doctors. There had been calls to relatives, an overnight vigil, a brief improvement that raised hope, and then a decline none of them could reverse. She died with Callan holding her hand. June, barely five, was too young to understand why her mother would not come home, and old enough to know the answer adults were giving her was not the answer she wanted.
The months afterward were made of practical things. School pickups. Rent. Laundry left unfolded on the couch because Callan had fallen asleep halfway through it. The discovery that June could not bear to hear a particular song Hannah used to sing while washing dishes. A row of small shoes by the door that kept growing, proof that time was moving whether he felt ready for it or not.
Some mornings he stood in front of the bathroom mirror and practiced looking as if he had slept. He was a young man with steel-blue eyes, strong shoulders, and the kind of face strangers might call handsome. None of that helped him find a lost permission slip or answer his daughter's question about whether heaven had windows. He learned to braid hair badly, then adequately. He learned which of June's classmates had nut allergies, which nights required clean sports clothes, and how to tell from the way she dropped her backpack that she needed a conversation before she needed a snack.
He also learned how expensive being present could become when a workplace considered everyone else's family obligations more legitimate than his own.
His first manager at Ashford Meridian had been kind about the bereavement leave. The second had admired his productivity and suggested he apply for leadership. Blaine Holloway, promoted into the chief growth office eighteen months later, had an entirely different view.
"You're talented, Mercer," Blaine said during their first formal conversation. "But talent is cheap. Availability is what makes people indispensable."
Callan explained that he could handle difficult work and occasional emergencies, but that he needed advance notice when a meeting would stretch into the evening. June's after-school program closed at six. Sometimes his elderly neighbor, Elena Morales, could help. Sometimes she couldn't. His daughter could not remain at school indefinitely because a senior executive decided at five forty-five that he wanted a revised presentation.
Blaine looked at him over folded hands. "You chose to have a family. The market didn't."