CHAPTER 75: Tuesday Morning

POV: Avalon Pierce

He was reading Nene’s board notes when Selene came home.

Margaret had given them to Selene three months ago and Selene had given them to him last week without explanation, she just set them on the desk because she had decided the time was right.

He’d been reading them for four days.

They were extraordinary.

These were Nene’s personal handwritten notes. The thoughts she’d had before and after and sometimes during meetings that never made it into official records.

Her handwriting was small and precise and occasionally impatient. Question marks appearing beside decisions she’d gone along with but hadn’t agreed with. Stars beside ideas that never got traction and circled when someone had said something that mattered.

His name appeared more than he expected from when he was a child and she was building a company and simultaneously building a grandson.

A talked back to his teacher today. **Margaret thinks I should be firmer but I  think he’s right and the teacher is wrong and there’s no point disciplining courage out of a child.**

He read that three times.

He’d forgotten that. The teacher and him talking back. He was only seven then.

Nene had thought he was right.

Selene came in at noon with Maya.

He heard them before he saw them, the sound of those two together which was a combination of overlapping sentences and laughter at things he never quite caught the beginning of.

He came out of the study.

Maya was dragging a suitcase that was objectively too large for a six day trip. She looked different in a way he couldn’t immediately name. 

Like she’d put something down somewhere in Accra and hadn’t picked it back up.

“You look different,” he said.

“Selene said the same thing.” Maya left the suitcase in the hallway “I’m fine tho.”

“I didn’t say you weren’t fine.”

“You had that face.”

“I don’t have a face.”

“You have several faces.” She looked at Selene. “He has several faces.”

“He really does,” Selene agreed.

Maya walked past him into the kitchen and opened the fridge with the ease of someone in their own home.

“Do you have anything that isn’t leftover Thai?” she said.

“We have eggs,” Selene said.

Maya turned around and looked at Avalon.

“She said that like it means something.”

“It does,” Selene said.

He smirked.

Maya stayed for two hours.

She told them about the school,  Kofi’s buildings and what they did to a person to walk through them, also about finishing the novel and what she wanted to do with the foundation.

He listened.

When she finished he said: “The visual identity.”

Maya looked at him.

“The foundation needs a visual identity,” he said. “Someone who understands how things feel rather than how they look.  Someone who can make it legible without making it generic.” He paused. “That’s you.”

Maya was quiet for a moment.

“I was going to bring it up,” Maya said.

“I got there first.”

“You’re annoyingly perceptive sometimes.”

“Sometimes,” he agreed.

Maya left at two with her oversized suitcase and a list of things to think about that she was already clearly thinking about.

The apartment was quiet after.

Avalon went back to the study , picked up Nene’s notes, found the page he’d been reading before they arrived and continued.

**The company will outlast me. That’s the point. You build things so they outlast you. But what outlasts the company? What are we actually building toward?**

She’d written that fifteen years ago.

He looked at the Pierce Foundation proposal on the laptop screen with the three names at the top.

He thought about her at her desk writing that question.

Then about Selene at this desk at 5 AM fourteen pages deep into the beginning of an answer and about how long some questions waited for their answers.

How sometimes the answer was being built in a room the person who asked the question would never see.

He picked up a pen.

Turned to the back page of Nene’s notes where the pages were blank and wrote one line.

She knew what she was building toward. She just couldn’t finish it herself.

Then underneath it.

We will.

He heard Selene in the kitchen.

The sound of her moving through the apartment was familiar enough now that he registered its absence when she was gone and its presence as something like weather. Atmospheric. Constant. Necessary.

He’d told her once she was the most inconvenient thing that had ever happened to him.

He still meant it.

Differently now.

She appeared in the study doorway.

“Maya wants to start Monday,” she said.

“Good.”

“Amara said she has something for the financial model by Thursday.”

“Good.”

“You’re still reading Nene’s notes.”

“I’ll be reading them for a while.”

She leaned against the doorframe.

“She wrote about you,” Selene said. “When you were seven.”

“You read them.”

“Some of them, she said there was no point disciplining the courage out of a child.”

He looked at her.

“She was right,” Selene said simply.

He looked back at the notes.

Inside the study, the lamp burned and somewhere in those handwritten pages a woman who had been dead for over a year was still managing to be exactly right about everything.

Which was, he thought, exactly like her.