“What if I’m not ready?” she finally managed.
“For an office.
For any of it.”
Corbin almost smiled.
“I wasn’t ready to take advice from a three-year-old, either,” he said.
“Look at what she saved me from.”
Adrienne sat with the folder in front of her and found that her hands were not quite steady.
It was not the salary, though the salary would change everything — would mean a real apartment, and a savings account, and the end of the arithmetic she did in the grocery line.
It was something underneath that.
For a year, this building had told her in a thousand small ways exactly what she was worth: less than the orchids, less than the marble, a pair of hands that made messes disappear and were themselves supposed to disappear when the work was done.
And here was the man who owned it all, sliding a folder across a table and telling her that the thing he valued most was not her invisibility but the opposite of it — the moment she had stopped keeping her eyes on the floor and looked up.
She thought of all the nights she’d cupped her hand around that small candle flame of a plan and been afraid to name it out loud.
Someone had just named it for her, and the wind had not blown it out.
It had caught.