Season of Gifts (Neighborly Affection #8)

34. Alice

Chapter thirty-four

Alice

R etracing her steps in the design space and the physical space yielded zilch. Zippo. Nada, nothing, pure frustration, what the hell was she missing?!

Alice’s team had done stellar work over the last year, improving the versatility of industrial presses for metal stamping and offering cold tubular stamping superior to extrusion. The factory could flip from commercial to retail jobs with minimal setup, machine parts in-house, and go straight from manufacturing to assembly. When the metal press at the front of the line wasn’t misaligning.

Alice could definitively say the system provided by her team held no defect whatsoever. The installation matched bang-on with the design. The system gave all green lights on the test punches. The press should’ve been turning blanks into perfectly formed shapes that would transform into high-end appliances shipping out the loading docks at the other end of the factory.

But saying no problem existed didn’t fix the problem; that didn’t make the client happy. That didn’t mean she could degrease her hands and fly back to Boston. By midafternoon, it was a guaranteed conclusion that she’d be in Sioux Falls another day.

The only bright spot had been her morning messaging with Jay. She’d sent him a quick love note when she woke, not expecting a response; his day started later than hers in any time zone. But he’d messaged back while she was toweling off from her shower, and she’d suggested video, and that had maybe gotten more handsy than she’d intended, but damn. At least she’d started her day with a bang and sent Jay off to his shower with a few added instructions.

Instructions.

The system was shut down while she crawled all over it. But when it was running, the entire machining process was hands-off, overseen by a human but following software guidance. They’d demoed the process for her yesterday, but she’d been watching the misfire, not the screen.

“Wade!” She jogged off the floor and into the conference room they’d been given as headquarters. “Got an idea. I need access to the software set, all of it.” Writing code was not her thing. But if she could find an error there, and the system functioned optimally once it was corrected, she’d be a damn hero. Her company wouldn’t be on the hook for the losses incurred by shutting down to fix a malfunctioning machine they’d designed. Millions, maybe. “I don’t think we’re at fault.”

Wade pushed up from the table and tossed his reading glasses onto the spec sheets. “Great, because my eyes are about to go on strike. Like you said, there’s nothing here.” He tapped the back of her hard hat on his way past. “Good thinking. I’ll get us an admin login from Adam. If he whines about operational security, I’ll have him send a data person down to monitor us.”

Twenty minutes later, Wade was back and not happy. The company didn’t have an in-house expert on the software. The control package came from another outfit, and the operators were only trained to input data, not read the underlying code. Probably part of the cost efficiencies Adam had bragged about at dinner last night.

Hunched over the terminal, she scanned line after line for the glitch that had to be there. The tightness gathered in her shoulders. She could use a massage from Jay tonight, a room check they’d both be missing this week, but the best she could hope for was the limitless hot water in the hotel shower.

From the screen to the operator’s printed manual to the spec sheet for the current order and back, again and again. Wade poked his head in just after five, and she pleaded to push quitting time to five-thirty. He backed off and let her work. The answer was here, something, somewhere—

There.

She scrolled three lines back and deciphered the instructions buried in the nested brackets and the operator’s input. “Ha!” Pushing with her feet, she shoved the rolling desk chair away and pointed finger guns at the screen. “Got you!”

Wade swung through the door, his hand on the frame. “You sound happy. We good?”

She waved him toward the terminal. “That’s their fucking problem—the control system parameters are set too wide by a decimal point! The operator cued in the wrong variance, and the system didn’t flag it as an error. They’re lucky it was small enough to offset the timing just a little. Could’ve been ten times worse with their setup.”

Wade called upstairs while she celebrated with vending machine iced tea. Sweeter than she liked it. Jay always did the best doctoring on her tea. Still, she swigged it down and arched her back, trying to work the cramp from her shoulders.

“The woman of the hour!” Adam swept in with a grin and clapped her on the shoulder. “And it only took two full days to find the problem.”

She swallowed the curse word forming on her lips. “Too bad you didn’t call in the software company first. Like I figured, my team does quality work after all.”

“Still smarting about that?” Rolling his eyes at her, Adam wagged a finger. “All right, let me make it up to you with dinner out. Congratulations are in order, assuming your solution works, which we won’t know until we get the team in for a test run.”

“Actually”—Wade pulled the same shoulder move on Adam, but smacked him three times for good measure—“I’ll need to have a working dinner with Alice to review her conduct on this project, but we appreciate the invitation. Another time. But about tomorrow—once that test confirms Alice’s find, I’d like to have a sit-down with your executive team to talk about how we can prevent errors like this one. Robust on-site safeguards and personnel training would be much more efficient than assuming a design flaw and footing the service costs for our little jaunt out here.”

Did Adam get paler, or was that just wishful thinking? Either way, she’d take it. Although reviewing her effort didn’t sound entirely positive, either. If she’d done something to get on Wade’s shitlist, that was news to her. But she projected a bland smile at Adam—of the many things Wade had told her about his job in the last three days, one was to always show a united front when the client was around. Questions could wait for privacy.

Despite her hard-hat hair, they headed straight for dinner after parting with Adam in the parking lot. At the first red light, Wade turned down the blower for the heat, dropping the noise by half. “I hope I didn’t overstep, but something just feels off to me about that guy. I get that you know each other from college”—he side-eyed her before the light changed—“and that’s fine, but managing potential HR crises is part of the supervisor gig too.” The car crunched and spun for a second on the snow before pulling forward. “Not that you seem like the type to deck someone.”

Jay’s sister flashed in front of her, with her smug smirk and her hateful lies. “Hitting someone is satisfying for about five seconds, and then utterly horrifying as you remember all of the repercussions coming your way.”

That earned her a sharper glance. “Now that sounds like a lesson you learned firsthand.”

And not a story she wanted to share. “Don’t worry, it’s one I learned well the first time. If you’re thinking you need to review HR rules with me—”

“Ah, hell, no, sorry about that. I just wanted Adam there to think personnel issue and run himself off home.” The turn signal ticked as they waited for an opening in traffic. Angling toward her, one arm across the steering wheel, Wade raised his eyebrows and leveled his gaze. “Your review is that you’ve done a phenomenal job, and your effort went beyond the scope of the project.”

Her fingers tingled with a rush of heat. She’d earned that accolade. The recognition sank way deeper than a pizza party for the whole team’s effort. Dad used to single her out like that, a great job! and a high-five when she helped him pack the car for a family camping trip or the first time he’d let her climb the ladder and string the Christmas lights along the roof. An embarrassing knot stuck in her throat. “Thank you. That means a lot.”

“You’re a hard worker—a smart worker—and a team player with leadership potential, Alice. A real problem-solver.”

“Well, you know, that’s…” Henry called her his problem-solver. He was neck-deep in a problem now, and she hadn’t done squat to solve it. Although he’d also been adamant about not wanting them up there. Interpreting his mood and meaning was difficult enough when she had the man in front of her. Reading between the lines of his messages was nearly impossible. Her whole body ached for just ten minutes in person to hold him, to rest with him, to be a team of three working on a single problem: getting his mom healthy. “It’s been an interesting challenge.”

Laughing, Wade sent them down the street toward their hotel and a cluster of restaurants. “Which could be code for ‘give me more of this’ or ‘hell no, I don’t want this assignment ever again.’”

She joined the laughter. Apparently she could be as mysterious as Henry.

“In all seriousness, though.” Wade tapped his thumbs on the wheel. “We’re stuck here another day. Your part should be done by lunch, I’d bet—just walk his guys through the issue, stay for the test run, and confirm how they should be setting up the machine going forward. After that, it’ll be meetings with the execs and probably dinner out with them. Both of which you can skip, unless this side of project management is where you see your career heading.”

“Nooo, no no no.” She flagged her hands in front of her in the universal sign for don’t bring that anywhere near me . “This has been a great learning experience for me. I have problem-solving energy, not people energy. I want to stay firmly in design—and close to home.”

Close to Henry and Jay, her real home. But if Wade didn’t need her tomorrow afternoon, and she couldn’t fly back to Boston until Friday—her stomach churned, more nerves than hunger. Mom and Dad were only an hour away.

“You can be sure I’ll put in a good word for you on that, Alice. Have you given any thought to shifting from industrial-mechanical to aerospace-mechanical?”

“Me?”

Slowing, then stopping, he waited patiently for someone backing into traffic before taking their parking space outside a steakhouse. “You have the smarts for it, and you like a challenge. And—” The engine hum fell silent. “It’s a direction the company wants to aggressively expand in. Lots of potential for growth there. They’re forming a new team next year. Not sure you’d make lead, not without the background, but…” He splayed his hands. “Something to think about.”

She thought about it from the car to the table and then some—not having to be the team lead, able to stay close to home, driving innovation in a private-sector and government field going up up up. More training, maybe—she could take classes to get her feet under her before switching over. But that was a question for another day, when she could talk it over with Henry and Jay.

Once they’d put in their orders, she swallowed her nerves and asked the more urgent question rattling in her head. “If you don’t need me tomorrow afternoon, would it be all right if I take the car?”

“Sure, go see the sights. You don’t need to hang around for that.” Wade unrolled his silverware and flipped the napkin in half before laying it across his lap. “Didn’t you grow up around here, you said?”

“Mitchell.” Where she hadn’t been in ten years. She’d stuffed everything she could carry into two duffels and a backpack. Ollie and Mom had driven her to the bus station for the long ride to Massachusetts, the farthest she’d ever gone by about, oh, fifteen hundred miles or so. “Home of the Corn Palace.”

He laughed his dad laugh, the warm friendliness aching like a missing tooth. “Never been, but you should go home for a visit. Tomorrow is just going to be listening to people arguing about whose fault this is, and I’m going to be gloriously magnanimous while I tout our amazing support services, aka you. I’ll get a lift back to the hotel afterward. Spend time with family while you can.”

“Family’s important.” More important to her now than it had been in years. On her own, she’d had exactly one tie: Ollie. And now she had Jay and Nat, and Henry and his mother, and Emma and Will and—too many people to count. Which was how it should’ve been all along. But rehashing her dysfunctional parental relationship would not make for an appetizing evening. “How’s your kid doing?”

“Kids, now. You’ll see, if you decide to have some—once one gets sick, the whole house becomes a hospital bunker. Strep all around.” His mouth tightened; he split a roll and began swiping butter across the cut sides. “I checked for Thursday night flights, in case there was something we could make tomorrow after the glad-handing, but no dice. Home by dinner Friday will have to do.”

“Nothing earlier Friday?”

He studied her for a second, then laid his knife across the plate. “How’s your mother-in-law?”

“Bit of a scare this week. Henry’s handling it, but…” She mimicked his earlier gesture, hands spread like a server with dinner plates. “I’d sure like to be there to collaborate on the problem-solving.”

“How do you feel about airport security lines at 4 a.m.?”

“Love ’em. They’re my favorite.”

The grin stretched her face, matching his. Unless something went catastrophically wrong, she’d be on her way home to her husbands Friday morning. And she only had two gauntlets left to run tomorrow.