Chapter 9 - Midnight
At 11:47 PM, my phone rang with Marcus Webb's name displayed, and I stepped further into the yard to take the call, aware that whatever happened in the next thirteen minutes would determine the fate of a deal I'd spent nine months building.
"I bought you until seven AM tomorrow," Marcus said, his voice tight with residual stress. "Halden's board agreed to hold the current offer terms if you can be in the Denver office by then with signatures ready. But Damon, I need you to understand — this cost me considerable capital with their board chair, who is not accustomed to being told the buyer needs 'personal time' on the eve of a major acquisition."
"Thank you, Marcus. I mean that genuinely."
"What's actually happening, Damon? In three years working for you, I've never once seen you deprioritize a deal for anything. Is everything alright?"
I looked back toward the house, where Cassandra stood visible through the kitchen window, checking on something on the stove, her silhouette achingly familiar even after three years apart.
"I found out tonight that I have two children," I said. "Twins, almost three years old. Their mother tried to tell me for two years and I never received a single message because of how thoroughly I'd insulated myself from anything outside of work."
The silence on the other end of the line stretched long enough that I checked to see if the call had dropped.
"I need you to fire yourself from managing my personal correspondence filtering going forward," I continued. "Effective immediately. I need a system that actually distinguishes between business noise and things that genuinely matter, because the current system nearly cost me three years I can never get back."
"I understand," Marcus said quietly, and I could hear something like genuine remorse in his voice, an acknowledgment that his efficient professional filtering had, however unintentionally, contributed to a genuine human cost neither of us had anticipated. "I'll have new protocols in place by the time you're back in the office. And Damon — for what it's worth, I'm glad you found out, however it happened. Congratulations."
"Thank you," I said. "I'll be at the office by seven. I need until then."
I hung up and returned to the porch, where Cassandra had rejoined me, wrapped now in a heavier coat against the increasing cold.
"You bought time," she observed.
"Seven hours. I need to be at the Denver office by seven tomorrow morning to finalize the acquisition."
"On Christmas morning."
"Yes," I said, feeling the weight of that timing fully for the first time. "Which means I have exactly seven hours tonight to figure out what happens next, and then I'll need to disappear for several hours to close this deal, and then—" I stopped, uncertain how to continue the sentence in a way that didn't sound like exactly the kind of empty promise Cassandra had spent three years learning not to trust.
"And then what?" she prompted.
"And then I want to come back," I said. "Today. Christmas Day. Whatever time the deal actually finishes closing, I want to spend the rest of the holiday with all three of you, if you're willing to allow that."
Cassandra was quiet for a long moment, and I watched her weighing the promise against three years of evidence suggesting my priorities reliably favored the company over anything personal.
"I want to believe that," she said finally. "But Damon, I need to be honest with you about something. I can't keep building hope around promises that might not survive contact with your actual life. Milo and Hazel are old enough now to form real memories, real attachments. If you disappear tomorrow after this deal closes and don't come back, or if you come back once and then vanish again in three months when the next major acquisition demands your full attention, that's not fair to them. I would rather you be honest right now about your actual capacity to sustain this than make a beautiful Christmas Eve promise you can't keep."
I sat with that for a long moment, understanding the fairness of the challenge even as it stung.
"Then let me prove it instead of promising it," I said. "Let me close this deal tomorrow morning, and instead of flying anywhere else, instead of taking the next meeting my calendar inevitably has scheduled, let me come back to wherever you and the twins are and actually spend Christmas Day there. And then let's talk, honestly, about what a sustainable version of me being present in their lives actually looks like — not a fantasy version built on holiday emotion, but something real and specific and structured enough that you can actually trust it."
May you like
Cassandra studied me for a long moment, snow continuing to fall around us, the porch light casting everything in a soft, warm glow that felt, despite the late hour and the enormity of everything happening, strangely peaceful.
"Okay," she said finally. "Prove it. Starting tomorrow."
