After he ended the call, Maya said, “That was dramatic.”
He met her eyes. “I was preventing myself from saying something unhelpful.”
She leaned against the counter, suddenly too tired to stand. “I’m sorry.”
“I know.” He came around the island more slowly this time. “Maya.”
She looked up.
“I will screw this up sometimes,” he said. “I’ll bring home the wrong thing. I’ll say the wrong thing. I’ll try to fix what can’t be fixed quickly because that’s the only skill set I’ve had for most of my life. But I am here. That part is not temporary.”
The word temporary landed differently now. It had once meant the length of the contract. Then it meant the phase of crisis. Now it carried some other threat neither of them was willing to name.
Summer edged into the city. The park grew lush and humid. Maya’s stamina improved enough that the morning walks turned into longer routes, then intervals with a trainer named Vanessa who was merciless in the kindest possible way. Taylor joined every session. At first Maya assumed this was guilt or showmanship. But Vanessa, who had no reverence whatsoever for billionaires, worked him just as hard. He accepted correction badly the first week and then, to Maya’s private delight, began accepting it well.
“You are deeply annoying when you’re trying,” she told him one morning after he finished a set of incline intervals without complaint.
He wiped sweat from his neck. “I could say the same about you.”
“Mine is character. Yours is conditioning.”
He laughed, breathless. It was the first time she had heard him laugh without calculation in it.
There were other changes no doctor had prescribed.
Taylor started asking about her work in a way that went beyond polite interest. Not the surface version—How was your day?—but the real questions. Which families were getting funding cut. How foster placement decisions actually happened. Why women stayed in homes where the danger had become ordinary. What happened to children once the emergency part of intervention ended and paperwork replaced urgency. Maya told him. Sometimes he sat very still afterward, one hand covering his mouth, as if he had spent years believing suffering existed mostly in articles and foundation speeches.
