Chapter 6 - Landing
The remaining three hours of the flight passed in a strange, suspended quality of time — Milo eventually falling asleep against my shoulder somewhere over Idaho, Hazel gradually warming enough to show me, with great seriousness, the specific personality traits of her stuffed elephant, whom she'd named Mr. Gray Bear despite him being, unambiguously, an elephant.
Cassandra watched all of it with an expression I couldn't fully read — cautious, still guarded, but with something loosening slightly around the edges as the hours passed and I demonstrated, in small, unglamorous ways, that I was capable of the sustained attention actual parenting required rather than the performative interest I suspected she'd half-expected.
"You're good with them," she said quietly, at one point, while Hazel dozed against her arm and Milo remained asleep against mine.
"I don't know if I'm good," I said. "I know I'm trying, in a way I haven't tried at anything outside of work in a very long time."
"That's more than I expected, honestly," Cassandra admitted. "I spent the first hour of this flight fully prepared for you to disappear back to first class the moment the plane landed and never think about any of this again."
"I understand why you'd expect that," I said. "I gave you every reason to over the last three years, even without knowing what I was actually failing at."
We landed at Denver International Airport just after nine PM, snow falling steadily outside the terminal windows, the airport decorated with the particular exhausted cheerfulness of Christmas Eve travel — a slightly wilting evergreen garland here, a Santa Claus display abandoned by its handler for a dinner break there, holiday music playing tinnily over speakers that had clearly been running the same six-song rotation since Thanksgiving.
My phone, the moment I switched it back on, exploded with missed calls and increasingly urgent texts from Marcus Webb and my legal team, each message carrying more barely restrained panic than the last as the midnight deadline approached.
Damon, where are you? We need you at the Denver office within the hour.
Halden's board is getting nervous. Voss Capital increased their offer twenty minutes ago.
I don't understand why you're not responding. This is the biggest deal of your career and you've gone completely dark for six hours.
I read through the messages while Cassandra gathered the twins' belongings, sleeping Milo transferred carefully into a stroller, Hazel clutching my hand with unexpected trust as we made our way toward baggage claim.
"You need to deal with that," Cassandra observed, nodding toward my phone.
"I do," I agreed. "But not before I see where you're staying tonight, and not before I make absolutely certain this isn't the last time I see either of them before I have to leave the city again for the next deal."
I called Marcus as we walked, keeping my voice low so as not to wake Milo.
"Where the hell have you been?" Marcus demanded, the professional restraint I'd trained into him finally cracking under six hours of unexplained silence during the most critical negotiation of the company's history.
"I found out I have two children I didn't know about," I said, watching the words land with an almost physical weight even as I spoke them aloud for the first time to someone outside the immediate situation. "Twins. Almost three years old. I need you to push the signing deadline."
There was a long silence on the other end of the line. "You want me to ask Halden's board to extend a midnight deadline on Christmas Eve because you just discovered you're a father?"
"I want you to explain to them that Whitfield Technologies remains fully committed to this acquisition and to the medical mission behind it, and that I need until tomorrow morning to finalize personal matters that have nothing to do with the company's commitment to this deal."
"Damon, if Halden's board thinks for one second that you're not fully focused on closing this—"
"Then you'll need to convince them otherwise, because I am not walking into a boardroom tonight and pretending the last six hours didn't happen. Marcus, I need you to trust me on this, the same way I've trusted your judgment on a hundred decisions over the years. Buy me until tomorrow morning."
Another long silence, then, finally: "I'll do what I can. But Damon — after three years of you never missing a deadline for anything, this is going to raise questions I'm not sure I can fully manage on my own."
"Let it raise questions," I said, surprising myself with how little the prospect actually bothered me. "Some things are more important than looking unshakeable in front of a boardroom."
I hung up and looked at Cassandra, who had been listening to my half of the conversation with an expression somewhere between skepticism and cautious surprise.
May you like
"You just risked a seven-hundred-million-dollar deal," she said, "for a conversation with children you met four hours ago."
"I risked a few hours of one deal," I corrected gently, "for the chance to actually begin the rest of my life with two people who apparently already existed the entire time I was building it."
