Chapter 10
Ben
Ben’s brain is stuck on a continuous loop of holy crap, holy crap, holy crap. There’s no way he signed these papers. Absolutely none.
Sure, yes, the signature on every page looks distressingly like his own. But he’s careful about what he signs. He reads things. He’s not the kind of person who just scrawls his name on whatever crosses his desk.
His calendar pings, startling him: five minutes until the weekly supervisory touch-point meeting.
No time to fall apart. He snaps the binder shut, presses it hard against his chest, and shoves the rising panic down as deep as it’ll go.
His feet carry him down the hallway while the rest of him is locked inside his own head.
He only comes back to himself when he hears the voices leaking out through the open conference room door.
“...too many goddamn meetings, that’s the problem with this place,” Tom is saying, frustrated and clearly not trying to keep his voice down.
“How the hell am I supposed to do my job if I can’t be on the floor?
Then the kid steps in and ‘fixes’ it behind my back.
It’s unprofessional. That’s my department. I should’ve been looped in.”
Kent’s reply is softer, a steady counterpoint to Tom’s tirade. “It got handled, Tom. That’s what matters.”
But Tom’s not in the mood to be placated. “It’s those idiots in packaging. How hard is it to read a scale? Are they checking everyone completed grade school during the hiring process?”
Kent spots Ben in the doorway and gives a tight wince. Tom’s complaint dies away under a forced cough.
Ben could say something. Should say something. ‘Tom, if you’re having issues with our employees, in packaging or otherwise, there are proper channels to address it. We can speak to HR after this if you like.’ His father would have said it and Tom would have withered.
But Ben isn’t his father. Not even close. He just crosses the room and takes his seat.
Tom narrows his eyes, like it’s Ben’s fault he got caught talking out of turn, but the other managers and supervisors start filtering in, cutting off whatever choice words he had in mind.
The next hour blurs as Ben runs through the agenda: overtime rosters, capital project updates, seasonal prep. His voice sounds steady. His body doesn’t feel like it belongs to him.
But no one in the room seems to notice the binder on the table, or the way his hand stays clenched around the corner of it. And when the formal topics wrap up, everyone looks eager to bolt. Phones come out, laptops snap shut.
Now or never.
Ben clears his throat. “I do have one more thing. I just…when I was reviewing the MarineSelect Waste Services paperwork, something caught my attention.”
Tom interrupts him with a loud snort. “This again? Jesus, it’s not that hard to understand. Production up, waste up.”
Ben clenches his jaw so hard it makes his molars hurt. “Right. But it’s not just about the volume. It’s... it’s the arrangement itself we need to re-evaluate.” He hates the quiet whine in his voice.
Kent, half-focused on a buzzing phone notification, cuts in indulgently. “Kid, this is a mile above the pay grade of everyone in this room.”
A few supervisors chuckle, a polite little ripple. The room slips through Ben’s fingers. Eyes glaze. Bodies angle away.
“Ben, I love your enthusiasm for this blue-sky stuff,” Kent says, nodding at the binder like it’s some idealistic vision board for greener suppliers, not a potential disaster.
“But I’m already late for a call. Tell you what.
How about you package your ideas into a quick proposal and we can slot it into next month’s strategy block.
We’ll give it a full discussion, make sure it gets the focus it deserves, yeah? ”
Kent’s tone is reasonable, supportive, kind even. A benevolent brush-off. And not privately, either. In front of everyone.
Tom scrapes his chair back, pointedly loud. “I gotta get to the floor. Some of us have actual work to do around here.”
Kent’s brow creases suddenly with irritation.
“Tom. I think you need to watch your tone. Some of us are starting to get the impression that you think you are the only one who knows how to do their job around here. Son, I promise I wasn’t waiting a couple decades for you to show up to fix my shit for me.
And I’d ask you to consider whose last name is on the fucking factory before you beak off next time.
I’m pretty fucking sure it isn’t yours.”
The color in Tom’s face vacates instantly, and he doesn’t manage to speak before doing the same.
The flush flashes up Ben’s neck, burning hot. Everyone in this room saw another man fight his battle for him. He glances at Kent, who only gives a benign little nod, the meeting already done in his mind. “We’ll circle back to your thing in the new year, alright?”
By then it’ll be way too late. He feels like the air has been sucked out of his lungs.
The room clears around Ben but he’s frozen in place, staring at his screen, stomach twisted like someone’s tied a dozen fisherman’s knots inside of him and pulled them all tight.
Part of him desperately wants to just shove the binder into a drawer and pretend none of this ever happened. But he can’t unsee it: his signature, his name, on a contract he knows he didn’t sign.
So what the heck is he supposed to do now?
Ben drives, snow tunneling in the high beams, wipers scraping across the icy glass in juddering arcs. He tells himself that seeing MarineSelect’s facility in person will help. That it’ll make this all feel less terrifying.
It doesn’t.
The address in Somerville turns out to be a locked metal door in a crumbling industrial park, one dim light, two listing box trucks.
Not a scale or safety placard in sight. No yard.
No incinerator. Definitely no way a legitimate hazardous waste processing operation is being run out of this glorified broom closet.
He stands in the slush until his toes go numb, binder tucked under one arm, staring at the ugly gray door. What rattles Ben the most isn’t the fraud, it’s how easily it happened. How no alarms sounded, no questions were raised.
Hazardous waste is being shipped out to God-knows-where on the strength of a few signatures. Ben’s signatures, ostensibly, on every single document. Someone inside Whitaker Seafood made sure of that.
Colleagues who’ve worked there longer than he’s been alive, senior staff who already think the owner’s kid doesn’t deserve the seat he’s been handed. If he starts pointing fingers, he’ll look paranoid. Desperate. It’ll destroy any shred of authority he has left.
He pictures the faces around the table at the supervisor’s meeting today. The forced smiles, the edge of condescension curling at the corners of their mouths. The kid’s out of his depth.
The problem is, they’re not wrong. Ben very much is.
He’s either the idiot who approved a contract with a fly-by-night waste vendor, or the idiot who can’t handle a real crisis his first week in charge without being rescued.
Back in the Jeep, Ben cranks the heat but he can’t stop shaking, the snow outside growing thicker, the sky turning gray behind the trees.
He spins the wheel hard as he backs out of the parking spot.
The binder slides over the passenger seat with a thump, like even gravity is telling him not to look away.
What’s left?
Do nothing at all. That’s option one, and it’s suicide by silence. Wait for regulators or activists or human error to blow this up. Probably destroy the plant’s reputation. Definitely destroy Ben’s.
Option two is to try Kent again. Except it’s crystal clear that even if he’s nicer about it than most, he doesn’t take this seriously. He’d go to Dad and Dad would be furious he’d heard it second hand. He’d start thinking that Ben didn’t look like leadership material.
The rule has always been simple, don’t come with a problem unless you’re already holding the solution. Which means option three, go to Dad himself, will only get Ben to the same outcome quicker: watching the door to his future slam shut in real time.
Dad will listen, sure, and he might even believe that Ben wasn’t dumb enough to sign those papers himself, but he’ll also know Ben crumbled under pressure.
Panic curdles into clarity. Those are all the sanctioned channels and they all lead to the same place, Ben flattened, credibility first.
Which leaves… nothing.
Ben coasts to the shoulder, hazards ticking. Snow hisses under the tires. He feels like he’s trapped in a sealed box, the air growing thinner by the second.
Think.
Who isn’t in the box?
Jackson James.
The idea flashes, bright and dangerous. Ben barely knows the man. They’ve had one conversation, an interview that left Ben more rattled than reassured. But he’d asked about their waste practices. He wasn’t just getting under Ben’s skin. He knew something and he wanted the same answers Ben did.
Jackson isn’t loyal to Whitaker Seafood.
He certainly isn’t worried about the approval of Ben’s father.
It’s risky. But he notices everything, digs for answers, and doesn’t seem to care who he makes uncomfortable in the process.
Exactly the qualities that scare Ben…and exactly the qualities he needs to fix this.
Jackson James might blow everything up right now, but on this particular evening, that seems better than sitting around waiting for the boom.